alt Hacker NewsThe sudden fall of Sora
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Was ChatGPT hyped?
It took off rapidly but that was hardly because of any hyping and almost entirely due to word of mouth and people actually liking the product, until the press picked up on it.
From what I remember they still had an invite process when they were getting popular and the demand clearly overwhelmed their servers several times, indicating a much bigger response than they expected. If anything I think OpenAI was downplaying the product at the time.
Meanwhile, Sora and other video models have become available on Openrouter. Are we sure this is the end of Sora? Or just the interface?
The hype cycle for AI products is brutal. Going from "this will change everything" to silence in a few months is rough. Makes you wonder how many other AI products are riding the same wave right now without anyone noticing.
The whole company appears to be a giant pile of burning cash at this point and I can only imagine that this wasn’t exactly helping that situation.
Was it fun while it lasted? Sorta, but it got old pretty quick.
Is this a business? Hell no.
Honestly given that they’re nowhere near profitable even with their main product this is the right move.
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They're just removing it from public access and selling it to big money instead. Think large advertising companies, government agencies, Coke-Cola, Hollywood, etc. The scary part is now that they've removed it publicly, it's going to be harder to keep a pulse on what is real and what is fake. We can't trust any video, audio or text content now.
It makes total sense to me that this would happen. The economics around Sora and video generation in general are just not there right now, and if you're a company that's also doing research into these things, that's basically a bottomless pit for money. I think OpenAI ceding the space to Google and others for the moment is probably the smart move.
I had fun using Sora and I'm bummed to see it will get removed from the API as well later this year, but no biggie. Veo is plenty good.
It really must cost so much money to generate these videos. That they can generate 12 second videos that are high quality in such a short amount of time - that takes some serious horsepower.