alt Hacker NewsGoodbye to Sora
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I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
As someone who generally liked the products that OpenAI puts out, I think Sora was their first product that I really didn't like. I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as fast as possible. And I felt like OpenAI's other products, like Deep Research, agent mode, etc, were the same way. Even Atlas, although I suspect it will be equally ill-fated, attempts to follow this same pattern. It really felt like OpenAI was separating themselves from the common popular apps like Tiktok, Reddit, Instagram, etc, which seemed to exist entirely to distract me from things I care about and waste my time.
Sora was the first product OpenAI shipped where I felt that fell into that second category, and for that I was very disappointed. You have all those GPUs, and the most incredible technology in the world, and the most brilliant engineers, and all you can think to do with them is to make an app that just makes meme videos? I mean, c'mon!
Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there? Even if Sora wasn't a spectacular success, it seems to me like subsequent model improvements could have moved the needle - shutting it down so soon seems premature. I mean, what if this is the equivalent of making ChatGPT with GPT 3?
Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/
Not a great look that either the teams responsible for Sora didn't know this was coming or the decision was so brash that things changed overnight.
The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that
Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"
Crazy how far the hype dropped from this product when only the paid influencers had access we were told "It's like a reality simulator" but when it became widely distributed it didn't deliver anywhere near that hype, you look at the front page of it today and it's identical to the Grok video gen front page, very underwhelming.
Man I find the HN crowd so cross and fickle sometimes. I think it’s just because when companies get bad rep it affects how people view the products? Im autistic and tend to focus on the tech
SORA ( whatever that means) was one of the most astounding demos I’ve probably ever seen ( ChatGPT was more gradual ).
The shock and awe of rendered AI video blew my mind.
Yes months later everyone can do it and is bored by it and has strong opinions about what is right for society or not.
But it was a monumental piece of tech and I personally ( clearly incorrectly ) think the top comments should be appreciative of the release and the impact
Personally I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market But I don’t know enough tbh
"OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users" - WSJ
Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
> OpenAI launched Sora last September, aiming to expand its dominance among consumers by creating a TikTok-style social feed that allowed users to share AI-generated content with one another.
I never understood what this app was about. TikTok (and I would argue most modern social media platforms) isn’t really about sharing things with friends, it’s about entertainment. Most people watch TikToks and YouTube videos because they are entertaining. Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?
OpenAI pivoting to B2B and coding makes sense, but it leaves a massive vacuum in consumer video. ByteDance simply integrating better generative models directly into CapCut will easily capture all those users.
Not good, seems like they are running out of cash and partners abandoning them. They had no real moat to be fair. Anthropic eating their lunch in enterprise and other players have cashflows from other businesses (XAI, Google)
And this kills the Disney deal:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
With Sora stepping back like this, it seems like the perfect opening for ByteDance to step in and capture the market with Seedance 2.
What a decision , maybe it's not profitable or they are preparing for something big ? i don't think OpenAI will lose like this
You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...
Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.
as a sora user:
- sora was not great at making what you asked
- i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
- every video that was good needed editing outside of sora (and therefore could not be shared within sora)
just my experience
It’s been interesting seeing OpenAI pivot. Snapping up popular open source devs, sicking their bought and paid for politicians on their competitors.
They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.
RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.
To focus on code generation - arguably the easiest problem to solve.
So strange that they fell behind after leading the charge on video from Will Smith spaghetti through the spectacular launch of Sora.
Turns out anyone can get that look by appending “like an Octane render”
Beyond that, like Kling and Hailou quickly surpassed them on product, and OpenAI never even attempted text-to-3d as if they are entirely uninterested in rich media.
OpenAI reminds me more of Meta than any other company. They’re both pioneering in their space and yet are mere commandeers (not innovators) when it comes to technology and importantly end user products.
They’ll also be extremely valuable, like Meta due to their ad product and ever-growing user base over the next 10 years, and I guess by focusing on code they plan to capture a segment of the developer market à la React or Swift.
Will OpenAI release a language or framework? An IDE? I bet the chat paradigm stays for the ad product and aging user base (lol) while the exciting innovation will happen in code automation and product development - an area they are not really experts in.
I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!
Was Sora just a honeypot to get a media company (ie Disney) to invest a lot of money into OpenAI?
Maybe it achieved its objective?
Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?
This was inevitable since Antropic made a fortune by releasing single app with only text generation business. They did best code generator and targeted developers and enterprise users. OpenAI did only 1.5 million dollars from Sora which is obviously far from profitable. So it is logical to assign GPU time to more profitable business.
Unlike, say, Seedance 2.0 (which has yet to come to the West), Sora 2 was more of a tech demo than anything usable:
* It was (assumedly) expensive to run.
* It was not good enough for customers to seriously pay for.
* There were too many content restrictions for it to be fun for most people.
at least they‘re not trying to play the „our tech is too dangerous“ card as the sunset reason (again [yet]).
also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…
Two separate problems killed it: novelty wore off for casual users, and content restrictions killed it for power users. Most engaging video content online is IP-based — memes, fan edits, remixes. Sora tried to build a social platform while banning the vocabulary that makes content worth sharing.
As a big user of ai video gen(my Google veo bill last month was $130) this doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
There’s so many video gen models out there and given the cheaper Chinese models I’m not surprised they closed this down. Besides the initial push, any marketing regarding video gen has always been the Kling or Higgsfield models. Just never a reason to do sora
It was neat to be able to try my own prompts and get a sense of what the state of video generation was. But I certainly never generated something that I thought I got real value out of on its own merits, and I still don't understand why there was a social media component to the app.
Off Topic: I paid 100 $ for Dall-E 2 credits back in the pre chatgpt days.
Then they killed Dall-E 2 and my credits vaporized.
Anybody found themselves in the same situation? What have you done?
I used Sora for a very brief time in late 2025. As ridiculous as the videos usually were, I always thought there was more evidence of human creativity and culture on there than on a standard, uncurated Youtube Shorts or Instagram Reels feed. AI-generated video presents some unique terrors to society, but I think most of the criticism of Sora could be directed equally to more 'traditional' social media. In any case, Sora is an impressive display of technology, but a poor product. I'm not too surprised it's getting killed.
I’m just wondering whether the real reason behind this is the cost of supporting the model and service, or competition from players like Seedance.
I was extremely impressed by the sora demo in Feb 2024, but there are exactly two videos I remember ever seeing from AI video gen services that will stick around in my mind: the one where realistic spongebob drives away from a cop, and Harry Potter Balenciaga (2026). The original sora launch seemed pretty boring to me as a non-creative, so I only gave it a few shots (in the early semi-failed original interface). I never tried the sora 2 app since I don't like shortform video.
Disinfo AI videos and the Coca Cola Christmas ad have also really soured my expectation of genuinely positive creative uses of video gen for the next couple years until more improvements are made, and I start seeing stuff go viral for being good instead of just being weird. I am still surprised that sora never had the grok problem of generating csam or seemingly anything along those lines.
Are we sure it was in that order?
Sora clearly was a waste of ressources. I liked using it for a few days, but I could tell it was consuming an insane amount of compute for 10-15 second videos that only a dozen people might watch.
Seedance 2.0 is about to eat reap the market gap Sora creates. It's truly superior in every way. It felt like Sora was stunted by OpenAI for long, consistent video generation (not to mention the crazy red tape around what you could generate).
Sora was fun
But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.
A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)
This makes sense. OpenAI correctly realized overindexong on consumer where there isn’t money is not the right way. By not focusing on enterprise they ceded the market to Claude. Now they are rethinking and pivoting
I think they have started seeing scratches in data center build up.
Sora was a perfect example of using a lot of compute to generate the video -> we need a lot of GPUs -> a lot of RAMs -> energy and land
I am predicting in the next 6 months RAM shortage will soften, not too much, because war in the Middle East will have additional impact for some time.
Disney's involvement with this was always strange. Their business lives and dies on the strength of their characters and their designs - why would you risk allowing a service to dilute them down and maybe misuse them?
Good riddance?
I can appreciate that the technology and research behind Sora could be helpful for many things, but I do not see anything good coming out of the consumer facing application.
It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.
Google gets stick for closing down applications after a decade. But OpenAI’s strategy seems to be to throw sh*t at the wall to see what sticks, but no company will (should) use a tool that could disappear in 6 months.
I'm hoping a side effect of AI Slop in that by increasing volume it decreases value and people eventually start finding all Internet slop less compelling.
It was fun, but from a business standpoint I’d have to think this was a giant pile of burning cash for OpenAI… even more so than the rest of OpenAI at the moment
That jumping Sora logo always made the videos unwatchable for me. So distracting from the scene of Elvis fighting aliens or whatever I was watching.
I tried using Sora for a month. Never paid for it. I tried many different ways of prompting and I was always underwhelmed by its output. The generation would also take so long and there was like a 50% chance it would fail due to content violations. I will say though that it was kind of addicting in a way. Just trying to crank the lever and see what would come out. But you'd always leave disappointed. It was a casino where the operator was losing money for every play.
I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..
Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and it's only natural for a lot of companies to overreach, but essentially reality and gravity are pulling them back. And as some other people have mentioned wall Street and others see that coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money and have a really profitable business and there are auxiliary functions. Driving addictive content is not really one that should be at the forefront and while many will continue to do that and we'll have all this generative content, I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
Over time we're probably going to see some really broad and strong use cases of AI, but I think in the case of social media or generative content, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about it. And I'm glad that they're shutting down this app as much as it's great to see innovation and technology and to see how far it's pushed. I prefer to see it when someone like Google does it? Because they're really doing it from the standpoint of this has broad applicable applications to something like simulation or training. Not whatever open AI was doing which honestly just doesn't feel very truthful. I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else. And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.