alt Hacker NewsGoodbye to Sora
Comments
So long and good riddance.
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.
Nowadays its strange that you put in a lot of efforts on a platform just to see these Goodbye messages, first digg was gone & now Sora.
It's just the social app being killed off, no? Wouldn't this line up with rumors that they'll soon let you create videos inside of chatgpt itself? I wish the actual video model would die but I assume this news is not that.
If they manage to compete with Anthropic in the enterprise market, are either of them able to reach profitability? To what degree are they subsidizing token usage and how tolerant are enterprise customers of significant price increases?
I never quite got "why" they made it a separate app. While I'm sure it was fun for a while, this felt like something that had limited staying power as the novelty is what was driving it. People don't really want to switch between video apps for their entertainment and having it be Sora only is too limiting.
So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app?
There's a web interface as well.
Nothing of value was lost.
May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13 rated in the future?
I had thought this would be combined with OpenAI launching a set top box where you could talk to an AI avatar. Disney IP could have been skins to sell people for their AIs.
One thing I'll give sora is that the remix feature actually required human input and enabled users to interact with each other through a novel means.
Relevant Music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLhXesNkCI
Amusingly, one of the ads on the page for me is a very obviously AI generated image of a man with sciatica. I say very obviously because his hands are on backwards..
So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app
First domino falls?
This is the indication of times ahead. Of AI services shutting down.
The cost must have been a key reason for the shutdown.
End is near.
Good riddance.
The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI cannot even protect THAT moat properly.
Conspiratorial thought - did OpenAI shut down Sora because one of their models started attaching it's weights to all the output videos, and some how escaped the farm? Not an original thought, "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies" authors proposed this is an option for an AI to escape the sandbox. lol. Imagine.
My guess is that we are going to see a new uber expensive video generation tool from them aimed at filmmakers in the next year.
Generated video is useful and valuable, but Sora was not a frontier model.
Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.
I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.
the invisible hand of the market strangles its strongest adherents
The desire for something "new", for a Mildly Ethical product, killed off the most obvious path to success - to actually just make TikTok+AIGC, or in the present, Douyin+Seedance2.
I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)
Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?
gpt-image-1.5 works decently for generating images compared to old Sora, but you pay per generation. It's possible that monthly flat rates were too much of a loss leader for OpenAI. I imagine the server side cost for generating video for Sora 2 is much higher as well.
I suspect the issue was Sora likely had a very low ratio of consumers to creators which makes a route to monetization unlikely. There was no incentives for doom scrolling consumers to migrate to Sora when they were already getting plenty of short form videos on FB, IG, and TikTok.
The network effects of the other two platforms are too strong, and a value prop of “watch similar videos but they’re all AI” is not strong for consumers.
Also, say what you want about AI slop, but I was on sora a lot for a few weeks and there was a real explosion of creativity on there. It felt new and exciting and creators were engaging with each other and sharing feedback and tips. I generated a ton of videos and surprised myself with a flury of creative ideas.
Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models surpassing Sora's capabilities?
I think Sora was technically impressive as a concept. The way it was managed as a product wasn't good.
There didn't seem to be any marketing for it. Like I can't even remember an ad for it or any content creator type of person pushing Sora actively.
To get access to Sora I believe you needed to be on a paid plan?
It's really difficult to get user generated content going when it's behind a paywall.
It's also hard to tell if this means that openai is in trouble, or if this is just a badly managed product that deserved to be killed. With the negative sentiment on openai, folks might think the former.
turn out the schizos were right. most of OpenAI *real* investment money comes from Gulf countries. without that money flow they can't sustain the cash burn anymore.
What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
Apparently, all possible movies, cinematics and ads have been generated by "enthusiasts at home", so the tool is no longer needed.
On a more serious note, it could be a sign of a more powerful and general model being developed/released in the near future, that would include Sora capabilities. Or AI-doomers were right, and this sunset is one of the proofs for them.
- gary marcus is going to have a field day with this one
I can't imagine they were getting a good return on it. And frankly, nothing tht came out of Sora was consequential in a positive way. The tech is cool, but only works if the content generation is heavily guardrailed and most of it ends up as content farming fodder anyway.
Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of Florida. Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis political attacks.
Is this the thing that takes an already unusual video - an animal picking food from a Halloween candy on a porch caught on a porch cam - and turns it into a meme? The bear instead of the raccoon. Then turns into a cat playing a trumpet....then turns into massive spam where it turns into a grey area (a cat being surprised and chasing a dog with a mask) that gets reposted endlessly?
A record speed into AI slop. Is this what everything turns into when content creation becomes easy? what's happening here exactly?
Well, gotta hand it to the haters on this one.
For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming table tennis player
Noo, they are taking it to loopt land
Generative video is insanely expensive and OpenAI is burning through money. They need to use the compute on things that they actually might make money on - like enterprise Codex usage.
OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.
Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable. Reminds of tech bubble 1.
It was the greatest thing yesterday.
Google Graveyard is joined by OpenAI. That's one problem of those big corporations - they eagerly kill off products and projects willy-nilly. It may make businss sense but why the prior promo? Those promos have been a lie, just like the cake was.
From the linked Hollywood reporter article:
"...the AI company exits the video generation business."
"OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, is not getting out of the AI video business [...], of course... "
I hate journalism.
It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...