If anything, Sora was an experimental question: giving away video generation is expensive, but is the voluntary user labeling and engagement data, which can be fed into RLHF, accretive enough to model training that it's a meaningful trade to make?

The shutdown of the service makes it clear that the answer was "no."

(It's not a particularly useful signal, though, in evaluating OpenAI's future. It could mean that OpenAI is less interested in video data, which might have implications on their AGI ambitions. It could equally mean that OpenAI has enough data that it's hit diminishing returns, or has found a cheaper source of labeling, or doesn't consider it meaningful one way or another. So there's a lot of thoughtpieces that the shutdown is a sign of weakness, but I don't think it's worth jumping to conclusions.)