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> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

The addictive toxic content will go the way of tobacco and explore new markets.

Back in 2010 around 11% of the population of Indonesia was connected to the internet. Currently it's closer to 80% - largely via mobile phones. That's approximately 200mln new users.

Nigeria and Pakistan are going through the same change, just started later.

Since 2016 India alone added more users than the mentioned countries combined.

That's a lot of first generation users. More than the entire western population.

"coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money"

Is it?

I have the impression GenAI deteriorates the internet both from a content and tech perspective.

Bots that waste your time because they don't work well or because they are pushing an agenda, and low quality content that floods social media from people who want to make a quick buck.

GitHub and AWS became increasingly unstable. X, Instagram, and WhatsApp are suddenly sprinkled with subtle bugs.

Everything just got faster and we got more of it, but nothing of it is good anymore because everyone tries to replace 90% of their work with GenAI instead ofmaybe starting at 10-20% and then add more when you're sure it works.

> where you can make money and have a really profitable business

I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

Coding is one topic but the big one is agentic ai.

You will have an agent like your seo expert, this agent will be able to use common tools like google seo, facebook seo etc. and you will teach how you want it to do its 'job'.

You will have a way of delivering your requirements to it, it will run in the background, might ask for feedback but will otherwise do stuff similiar to whatever person was doing it before.

There might be some transition phase like verifing the data of the real person vs. the agentic ai then moving over to only validation until the agentic agent is in avg as good as a human. Then the human will be gone.

Agentic will take basic support tasks (its actually already doing this) first, then more complicated things etc.

For this we need an ecosystem aka the agentic ai platform, interconnect between agent and tools and this stuff is currently getting build by someone one way or the other.

On scale we need more capacity and these agents will also cost more money than a 20$ subscription.

But if you have a, lets say SAP agent, it will be build once, trained once and than used by everyone. Instead of a person using a HR system or billing system, the agent will bridge the gap between data and system.

We could argue all day about what should be at the forefront, but addictive content isn't going anywhere, because addicts pay up.

In this case, maybe not enough to offset the costs; or maybe it just wasn't addictive enough. But it's still early days.

> "reality and gravity are pulling them back"

I like the framing of trying explosive things to escape the pull of gravity. When applied to rockets, it means a lot of stuff blowing up, which again seems apt.

>I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

They're not, they just already have the habit formed with the place they go to do that. Ultimately anything worth seeing on sora will be reposted to Tiktok.

I also prefer seeing a corporation like Google do it for two reasons: generative content might feed their cash cow also known as “YouTube” and Google already has a good base for coding assistants. Google owns, I think, 25% of Anthropic and earns money selling compute infrastructure to Anthropic. Personally I think Antigravity (with Claude and Gemini) and gemini-cli firmly keeps Google in the running as far as AI coding tools goes. I want to do business with companies that have a sustainable business plan. Google’s AI products for tech work, and ProtonMail’s Lumo+ product for all private daily web search and chatbot functionality is enough for me; I used to chase every commercial AI offering but not anymore.

For OpenAI that was and felt like some side husle they were playing around nothing more.

Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.

At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.

Had Waffle House with some friends who mostly work in blue collar industries. One guy who works at a timber mill used Claude code to redo their ordering system. Took him about a month to go from knowing nothing about Claude Code to finishing the system. Basically just copied a proprietary software product that costs them upward $20k a year. They’re keeping that other product to cross check but so far the Claude coded item works great, and is of course more custom to their business. The dudes a hero at work because the system is heads and tails better.

Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.

I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.

>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.

Ironically, starting your response with this guarantees a lot of people won't read it. It's the same as going on reddit and starting a reply with, "Nobody will see this but", and hoping that people try to prove you wrong by reading and commenting on it. I stopped after the first sentence. People really have to stop with the clickbait vomit way of writing.

> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

Considering the large million plus view counts I see AI slop getting on FB and YouTube I'm not seeing this behaviour play out.

I had fun with it for about a week, but the thing that disappointed me the most wasn't the technology, it was the _people_. You have a machine that can make anything you can imagine, and the space of what people were exploring was so _small_.

> I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else.

    [...] do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

    For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's
    shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their
    fingers.

    But all their works they do for to be seen of men [...]

    [...] they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

Nothing is new under the sun.

The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”

Sounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.

This is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.

It's not really that people wouldn't come back - it's that they were losing money on each customer.

Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

24/7 titillation is boring

This tracks my usage exactly. It was like Mad Libs - in that moment it was THE MOST FUN but after a while it became just a novelty bordering on... creepy. Now I feel kind of guilty for having exposed so many friends to what looks like a data gathering scheme.

I thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.

It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?

And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.

I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.

I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.

"...and when everyone's super, no one will be"

I think this is starting to play out.

When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it altogether.

Yep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day.

There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.

Reminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a couple days then the novelty wore off.

A lot of AI hype is parlor tricks

Sounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start

The Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and I'm pretty deep in this space.

I honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.

Humans are very good at pattern recognition, even if you generate different stuff, you still see a pattern, either in the cutting, color, cadence of movements, the color grading, camera lens used, everything, your mind will tag it as slop.

Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over subconsciously

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> 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

i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer yes"

What happened is that they make no money, because people use it an masse to generate videos that they then post on TikTok and Instagram, nobody actually doomscrolls Sora.

> 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.

Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed, apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued a metric.

At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!

Hosting videos is really expensive. AI video generation inference is really expensive. I'd love to see how much money this experiment cost.

> 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.

I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user, especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get you to follow up with more.

> What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors?

> For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900 commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be replaced.

> (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points)

> If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800, RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and what typical wear looks like.

The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you want" follow ups are so annoying.

> Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown

I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified.

They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.

"I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown"

I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear that they were never going to be able to deliver on this.

Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent.

Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be possible to copyright, which is their core business.

For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person.

I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives.

He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too.

Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too.

Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.

> Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there?

My guess is they over committed server/energy resources, since they were generating ~30 images per frame of 1 second of video for results that may be discarded and then tried again.

Now that energy costs are increasingly less predictable because of the war, they're prioritizing what is sustainable. Willing to blow up the $1 billion Disney deal for Sora, because that's a popular IP that would have increased discarded server time.

The app isn’t shutting down today, so they may have decided that the write up is still useful.

There is a link at the top of that document that takes you to the original version which was published last September. As far as I can tell it’s mostly the same as before.

i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than vice versa

I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary.

There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).

I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.

I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their video gen models

Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.

Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case.

I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.

Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for

> who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

I guess you haven't watched hours of AI cat videos cheating on their husbands with bulls, or Lemons having babies with strawberries and fighting over custody of the child. It's absurd, it's stupid and I know it's a waste of time but I have to admit that it amuses me. I'm quite sure there are millions like me that just want some downtime to relax at the end of the night and end up watching slop like this.

There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it leads me to think they were trolling

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.

If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.

> The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?

It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.

But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.

I think Sora is an excellent way to see how people's beliefs clash with reality. Even in this post, I see people likening Sora to unveiling "a weapon", it filling them with "bland dread", or comparing it to creating "killing robots". But now that Sora is being shut down, what impact did Sora actually have on society, other than getting a couple of people to waste their time making some funny meme videos? Did any of those negative externalities actually play out?

If you are autistic, I feel that it causes you to see reality a more accurately than most here on this thread.

Sora was a bit like seeing a new weapon being demoed. No matter how much engineering went in to it. The overwhelming feeling was “this is bad for society and the consequences will be massive.”

So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.

The tech was fine/interesting for what it is. The product itself is awful and something from nightmares. It's not an enjoyable experience for me watching some uncanny valley slop. I'm not impressed with the "creativity" of someone typing in a prompt and having a plagiarismbox spit something out. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of someone actually making something is what I like. The emotion and reasons behind a work of art make it inspiring. The details of their perspective and choices they make when creating it are beautiful and interesting.

The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.

> I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market

As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly unethical thing to do.

I have gladly been paying $20/month for ChatGPT since the day web search was available and I use codex-cli every day instead of Claude and never have to think about limits.

I also use ChatGPT as my default search engine and to help me learn Spanish.

But image generation and video generation were a nice parlor trick. But wasn’t useful for me except for images for icons for diagrams.

But light you said, porn makes money and there are people who pay $300 a month for Grok to generate AI Porn.

It's not that, the demo was impressive but when it became wildly available the reality of it never lived up to what was demoed and it later came out some of the shorts they did with directors had a lot of editing to them anyway.

Interesting to hear your perspective. There was no shock and awe to me, ChatGPT changed what I thought was possible with computers, and everything else as far as photorealistic generation and then video just seemed inevitable. I decided to abstain from watching any video I know is AI, but of course now it’s mixed in with television and advertisements. I’ve started data hoarding old TV shows thinking it will be nice to have something to watch when the internet goes down.

"I'm autistic and tend to focus on the tech" is not a justification, and I would advise to stop using it as such. Would you apply the same to killing robots? Hey, the Hyperthrasher 2000 mauls people and shreds them to pieces, but it's the most impressive TECH demo I've ever seen!

all ai video will be remembered as horrific and a showcase that its creators have no ethical foresight

The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it, they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.

Sure the tech was cool, but people already hated youtube shorts when they were added. I think the "HN crowd" is probably the type to dislike short form content, so that might be where some of the dislike comes from.

The iPhone X's new feature where it approximated you facial expressions on a 3D character using the facial recognition sensors blew my mind as well.

It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it. That's what SORA is, or was.

It is the last narrative that some of Wall Street believes and has enough mediocre or senile coders to promote it.

That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.

How are they going to claw back the market from Anthropic though?

Not enough money though. Not hundreds of billions of dollars.

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> 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?

I don't know where they got September from; Sora launched in Feb 2024[0] which was a bit before people had become tired of awful AI-generated content. There was real belief that people would be willing to spend all day scrolling a social network with infinite AI-generated content. See the similar hype with Suno AI, which started a whole "musicians are obsolete" movement before becoming mostly irrelevant.

I think Sora 2 produced quite good videos, at least of a certain type. It was very good at producing convincing low-resolution cellphone footage. Unfortunately you had to have a very creative mind to get anything interesting out of it, as the copyright and content restrictions were a big "no fun allowed" clause, which contributed to its demise. Everything on the main Sora page was the same "cute animals doing something wholesome and unexpected" video.

My "favorite" part was how the post-generation checks would self-report. e.g. It was impossible to make a video of an angry chef with a British accent because Sora would always overfit it to Gordon Ramsey, and flag its own generated video after it was created!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".

There were ~trends similar to what appeared early in TikTok.

For example, early TikTok had the Boss Walk.

Sora had no big content trends split into many micro trends in some established ~universe.

They wasted their first mover advantage by focussing on what amounts to building toys for consumers like Sora instead of actually useful products that go beyond simple chat bots.

I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.

I had a sense things may be turning against them when my accountant asked me last week if I’d like to participate in their new round ($750B premoney) with no carry. How am I suddenly blessed with such exclusive access, at no cost?!

Yes, I'm reading this as a sign of strategic failure and decline.

ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things - but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.

> XAI

Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

I think that it’s better that everyone collectively realize that video is no longer default-trustworthy in a widespread manner, if the alternative would have been the public finding out only after a long cycle of misuse by high-level actors and subsequent whistleblowing à la PRISM/Snowden.

Yeah, I thought it was strange too. I thought OpenAI could meaningfully differentiate by being something more like a “Social Media AI”.

I feel like they are sailing into a red ocean with what look more like copycat tactics than innovation (e.g., Codex v Claude Code; Astral v Bun)

I don't really disagree, but the proper way to think about it was that with Sora some of that ability democratized. Now it will be available only to the rich and powerful ( and nerdy ). Humanity may not need it per se, but removal of that option that does not automatically make it better; not if the removal is only for a portion of the population.

Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.

I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.

In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.

- i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens

My experience with AI image generation is similar, although with a higher success rate (depending on how accurate you want the result to be); but indeed, filtering is a major part of the process.

In my experience, Sora was fantastic for what it did. Light years better than Adobe Firefly. On par with Leonardo.

A lot of YouTube content is really talk, so it was easy to create Sora videos as video content while you talked over them.

However, its failure was that it watermarked everything. WTF? Leonardo didn't do that. Neither did other models. So while video gen was excellent, you always had these ridiculous floating watermarks.

Really? A video meme generator is making your top evil products list?

It's really funny how people can say these things online without giving them a second thought. There are literal weapons being produced that are killing people daily. But no, it's the meme generator that's evil.

Yes, and Disney is apparently no longer investing in OpenAI, making one more example of an OpenAI investment hype cycle that turned out to be hot air.

Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...

  A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.

  “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson said. “We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”

Wow. OpenAI is the weirdest company in the planet.

I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.

We need a 'killed by OpenAI' site now

I'd wager that b2c projects former VP of Product at Instagram & CPO at OpenAI, Kevin Weil, may have championed are getting the boot with the company refocusing on making money under the stewardship of Fidji Simo: https://www.businessinsider.com/fidji-simo-openai-product-re...

Weil's now heading "AI for Science": https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...

I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like.

The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.

Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.

They wanted network effects because ChatGPT was sorely lacking any.

I actually thought the Sora app was promising at launch, at least on paper, but it seems like they failed to keep people's attention long term. With the failure of Sora i don't think they have good options left.

I suspect it is a combnation of both. When OpenAI goes for the IPO all their costs become visible and this could hurt their vaulation big time.

If it cost too much and others can do it cheaper, that looks bad from both fronts.

Sora was not the only video generation service, it wasn’t even the gold standard.

Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.

I feel like in several years we will look back at how we treated our most creative minds in disgust. This behavior will not be readily forgiven.

What market? I thought the whole point was that Sora at the end of the day couldn't find a way to generate revenue

As far as I can tell Disney didn't actually hand over the money yet. They were still in preparation and it's cancelled now obviously.

So whatever reason they say to shut this down, it was more important than 1B investment.

> OpenAI correctly realized overindexong on consumer where there isn’t money is not the right way.

It says a lot about the current economy that consumers have no money. Will companies just stop making consumer products?

Something about your phrasing is such hilarious techbrained spin.

Let’s be real: OpenAI is circling the drain.

The company with the fraudster serial liar CEO who said he was gonna spend a trillion dollars can’t keep a video service alive right after signing a $1 billion dollar with Disney?

What kind of a joke is that?

This is a company that has blown its opportunity twiddling around with zero product. They still just run a plain chatbot interface with zero moat and zero stickiness.

There’s no “pivot” for a company that is in this deep.

If you can't beat them, join em?

But now that the deal is off, I'm sure their legal team will attempt to once again change copyright law in their favor.

Stating the obvious but spraying and praying is not a strategy

Well there was the incident at Amazon[1]: "Amazon just did something unprecedented: they're forcing a 90-day safety reset across 335 critical systems after their AI coding tool caused catastrophic outages. The March 5th incident alone lost 6.3 million orders and triggered 21,716 peak Downdetector reports"

And two at Meta[2]: "A rogue AI agent at Meta took action without approval and exposed sensitive company and user data to employees who were not authorized to access it"

"director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, described a different but related failure in a viral post on X last month. She asked an OpenClaw agent to review her email inbox with clear instructions to confirm before acting. The agent began deleting emails on its own."

Even Elon Musk has shared the wisdom to proceed with caution! [3]

1. https://dev.to/tyson_cung/amazon-lost-63m-orders-after-ai-co... 2. https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confuse... 3. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366

I wonder if Anthropic has overtaken them in revenue, seems like more people would pay for Claude code than to chat with ChatGTP. Would be good to see Codex vs Claude Code income.

It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage to generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no audience is going to consume such videos.

Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.

> feels like the bubble is starting to pop

May be. OpenAI shuttering Sora is line with them shifting focus towards b2b sales, instead of b2b2c or b2c.

Interestingly, Aditya Ramesh, who iirc was the Sora 1 lead, is now "VP of Robotics" at OpenAI per his Twitter bio: https://x.com/model_mechanic

Nothing like an ill-considered war with global economic consequences to bring reality crashing back down on Silicon Valley; sometimes life throws a big old margin call your way and things break down.

I don't think so. Disney is ending their deal with them, it sounds like they're exiting video generation as a business.

According to WSJ they’re getting out of the video game entirely:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...

No. Money is moat. Not enough of it is what keeps the average person on the treadmill rather than drawing their own cartoons.

Hustle just to barely stay afloat water or drown, means no time to compete with our own output.

America is a financially engineered joke regurgitating its own recent history, collapsing like an LLM trained on its own output. The rich are not even pretending it's "a free country" as they have enough wealth for how many years left most of them have to live, and have seen the apathy to their own plight keeping the average person in theit lane they don't fear the public.

It’ll all collapse as they generationally churn out of life and the Millennials on down with zero skills but "data entry into a computer" will be holding an empty bag, taking orders from foreign nations that bought up all the American businesses we built.

shut up bot

Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.

You also have access to gpt-image-1.5 in the regular ChatGPT interface if you pay for a flat subscription - though I don't know how many images it limits you to per month.

They get to use if for services with better returns.

Seedance just launched, but they nerfed it. I guess so it can't generate things with preexisting IP.

Roxas*! Important because it’s sora rearranged (with an X for cool factor)

Really he already was, back in August 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.

From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."

Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.

i think that's a mis-statement of the problem being addressed here. It's not a question of how useful AI video will be generally. It's a question of OpenAI doing it specifically. IMO it's two factors:

1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.

2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much better job than they were.

Don’t worry nvidia will come with their giga chad 9000x which will run the model with no qualms.

It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.

Sora was "repurposed" as their AI slop social network. OpenAI is not getting out of the business of AI video in general, they're just realizing that an AI version of TikTok isn't the best use of their capital/resources.

It's the timeline of AI video that doesn't align with OpenAI. It's still far away for prompt to movie and they don't want to be another tool in the pipe for VFX because it doesn't pay. Other models are running circles around them because they focused on the needs of professionals in the space and not toys.

Yeah, their forth place video model does not go away, but they didn't ink a billion dollar with Disney that's just gone up in flames because they "weren't serious"

This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.

I'm bullish on video generation technology, but honestly not on OpenAI or any Western company's deployment of it. I think they'll all mostly suffer from the same problems that Sora did.

Is OpenAI still considered a startup? They were founded ~10 years ago in December 2015.

The only people I've seen post AI Disney content was in the Facebook groups for the parks / cruises. Before that it was whatever clipart they could find. There's just no market for it. No one is going to pay to make fake disney art.

Well, now they're no longer even close to being the leader in image & video gen. They aren't the leader in coding. They are losing market share in the chatbot domain too.

So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer 2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?

Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was probably hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move would have not to make this horrible product that no one wanted in the first place

After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?

I'm having trouble understanding this. There were some very funny videos, created by people with a great sense of humor, and I happen to enjoy laughing, and I don't feel bad about that. I always saw it as the Vine of AI.

For a litmus test of your perspective, try using sora. Try to make a video that makes someone genuinely laugh. Sora doesn't prompt itself. Human creativity and humor is still required.

Sure, it was moderated to heck, like all models attempting to avoid PR disasters (see Grok), but, just as with Youtube and broadcast TV, there's still a corporate friendly surface area that excludes porn, gore, etc, that people can enjoy. And yes, people like different things.

They are not getting rid of Sora because people won't want AI videos lol. They're getting rid of Sora because they're so behind in this realm. AI videos online are mostly made with Chinese models, and the situation has been like this for more than one year.

The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not decrease after Sora is gone.

The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.

Already being used in that manner, here a small glimpse - every video on this page is AI and an advert: https://www.tiktok.com/@livbennettstudies

I'm kinda surprised about how hard GenAI fell on its face in the arts (including SD and other video generators). It seemed so promising, when SD came out and it turned out the model fit on people's GPUs. People started making LoRAs, hyperparameter tunes, mixing models, training models for representing characters, ComfyUI and Controlnet came out yada yada.

Then it became synonymous with slop, lowest common denominator content made without care, instead of a tool for enabling people willing to put in a varying level of skill, kinds of expertise and effort, like coding models did.

This market will not be abandoned, and other tools already exist:

https://klingai.com/global/

https://aistudio.google.com/models/veo-3

https://runwayml.com

relax dude

It's because it's vapid corpspeak coming from a class of people who have certainly spent time thinking about how they will deal with the rest of humanity in any number of nasty (however far-fetched) eschatological scenarios caused by them and in which they alone wield incredible power over nature and the human mind. And also because we all know the vast, vast, vast majority, possibly the totality of what people made with Sora did not matter at all.

Or perhaps a more appropriate analogy, its sounds like the sycophantic language of most of these LLM systems.

Which makes me wonder whether these companies actually dogfood their own tools with this sort of stuff? Was this announcement written by ChatGPT? Honestly, I would find either answer to be a little concerning in its own way. It's either vaguely insulting to their customers or showing a lack of faith in their own product.

I think of the medical definition when people use LLMs to "express" themselves: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/express

It's a wonderful combination of vague, patronizing, and self-promoting. "Mattered" is meaningless. The tone sounds like when you tell a child their scribble is so pretty. And the cherry on top, the users didn't make anything with Sora, they just fed a bit of input into the machine and it made the stuff. So this is really OpenAI saying that what they themselves did mattered.

it feels like if that statement were true, they could have come up with some reason why it mattered, or something better than a platitude.

it reads as "we want to tell you that what you made with sora mattered, but we all know it didn't".

Typical PR speak.

It’s “Our Incredible Journey” for a new generation, this time with less optimism and more post-capitalist “enjoy your job while you still have it.”

I find myself increasingly nostalgic for the Clinton era. I am not at all sure I will enjoy the version of fuckedcompany that gets vibe coded when this bubble pops.

The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to operate, least monetizable model) seems like a simpler explanation. The legal costs/difficulty on top of "most expensive" are just the cherry on top.

What did Sora do?

probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't have much in common with llms

Nope. It was just a bad product that no one wanted. It’s not a super-secret indicator that OpenAI is actually going to take over the world any day now.

They paid for an opportunity. Sometimes paying for a chance nets you nothing.

If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for, you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.

If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a winner, in the same objective sense.

Probably controversial. Eh.

No way anyone is that stupid

That story can’t be true

Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams, for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level" intelligence. Will the machine dream?

What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?

AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.