Goodbye to Sora

1029 points - yesterday at 8:01 PM

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Comments

asim today at 9:17 AM
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.

meken yesterday at 11:37 PM
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.

johnfn today at 1:51 AM
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?

AlexAplin yesterday at 11:00 PM
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.

ex-aws-dude yesterday at 10:16 PM
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"

ionwake today at 2:28 AM
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

password54321 yesterday at 9:05 PM
"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

Sir_Twist yesterday at 9:14 PM
> 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?

small_model yesterday at 11:33 PM
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)
bandrami today at 12:11 AM
whywhywhywhy today at 3:14 PM
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.
iainctduncan yesterday at 8:52 PM
You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...
bschwindHN today at 12:48 AM
Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.
foolfoolz yesterday at 10:37 PM
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

yoyohello13 today at 12:29 AM
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.

p0w3n3d today at 5:39 PM
Sora shocked people but the real effect was and is that now people don't believe what the're shown. How many fingers Israeli PM has, was Russia Dictator alive, etc. Is this good? Critical thinking - maybe... uncertainity... not really.
ctdinjeu5 today at 12:23 AM
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.

umich2025 today at 3:37 AM
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

maplethorpe today at 4:26 AM
RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.
throw4847285 yesterday at 8:23 PM
Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

mcast yesterday at 8:28 PM
I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!
ronsor yesterday at 8:30 PM
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.

bbayer today at 6:35 AM
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.
deleted today at 3:03 PM
Imnimo yesterday at 8:58 PM
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.
theropost today at 5:40 PM
I'm a bit sad.. I was using it quite often for making quick videos for Teams instead of using Meme's and Gifs.. I just made my own :(
hnlyman today at 5:14 AM
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.
timpera yesterday at 9:02 PM
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.
epolanski today at 1:22 PM
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?

claytonia today at 6:30 AM
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.
semiinfinitely today at 7:53 PM
YEET
qqxufo1 today at 3:06 PM
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.
Yizahi yesterday at 10:52 PM
A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)
harlequinetcie yesterday at 9:27 PM
Are we sure it was in that order?
endofreach today at 1:30 PM
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


dalvrosa today at 6:43 PM
What are the best replacements?
imadch today at 2:59 PM
What a decision , maybe it's not profitable or they are preparing for something big ? i don't think OpenAI will lose like this
nighwatch today at 3:00 PM
With Sora stepping back like this, it seems like the perfect opening for ByteDance to step in and capture the market with Seedance 2.
Olumde yesterday at 10:40 PM
VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
KevinMS today at 4:56 PM
Its looking like Michael Jackson stealing KFC will be the peak of AI
softwaredoug yesterday at 9:14 PM
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.

fraywing today at 2:33 AM
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).
georaa today at 5:11 PM
The best test for any AI product: would you pay for it on month 3? For Sora, clearly not. For Cursor, I don't even think about canceling.
softwaredoug today at 2:30 PM
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?

yalogin today at 12:19 AM
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
dwroberts yesterday at 10:58 PM
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?
christianqchung today at 1:16 PM
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.

agnishom today at 1:05 AM
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.

throwaw12 today at 4:58 AM
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.

helsinkiandrew yesterday at 8:50 PM
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.
Halian today at 5:29 PM
Good riddance to bad garbage.
aldousd666 today at 2:49 AM
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.
jmugan today at 12:04 AM
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.
mikhmha yesterday at 9:25 PM
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..

pm90 yesterday at 9:59 PM
It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
cmiles8 today at 7:30 AM
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
StarterPro today at 5:25 AM
So long and good riddance.
rfarley04 today at 1:28 AM
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.
strongpigeon yesterday at 8:23 PM
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.
cdrnsf today at 12:38 AM
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?
bananamogul today at 12:54 AM
So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app?

There's a web interface as well.

steveharing1 today at 6:12 AM
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.
deleted yesterday at 11:52 PM
wj yesterday at 10:28 PM
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.

aarjaneiro today at 2:15 AM
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.
max_ today at 1:03 AM
deleted yesterday at 9:00 PM
weezing today at 8:52 AM
Nothing of value was lost.
overgard yesterday at 11:09 PM
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..
oliyoung today at 12:58 AM
So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app
PLenz yesterday at 10:10 PM
This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
wg0 today at 2:52 AM
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.

didip today at 1:46 AM
The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI cannot even protect THAT moat properly.
xnx yesterday at 10:47 PM
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.

mrdependable yesterday at 11:28 PM
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.
daikon899 today at 5:05 AM
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.
davidham today at 1:37 AM
I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.
wiseowise today at 8:28 AM
First domino falls?
152334H today at 2:09 AM
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.

noemit yesterday at 8:49 PM
I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)
poemxo yesterday at 9:52 PM
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.
nprz yesterday at 8:30 PM
Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models surpassing Sora's capabilities?
reassess_blind today at 3:15 AM
Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?
npn today at 2:34 AM
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.
systemsweird today at 5:43 AM
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.

deleted yesterday at 10:43 PM
tabs_or_spaces today at 5:43 AM
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.

malbs today at 11:46 AM
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.
latchkey yesterday at 10:06 PM
What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
arkadiytehgraet yesterday at 8:50 PM
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.

nnevatie today at 12:50 PM
Good riddance.
razvan_maftei today at 1:59 AM
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.
cyberge99 today at 1:07 AM
Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of Florida. Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis political attacks.
mancerayder today at 3:34 AM
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?

vivzkestrel today at 9:38 AM
- gary marcus is going to have a field day with this one
nashtik today at 4:36 AM
For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming table tennis player
born-jre yesterday at 11:34 PM
Noo, they are taking it to loopt land
creantum yesterday at 10:39 PM
It was the greatest thing yesterday.
dcchambers today at 2:21 AM
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.

throw03172019 yesterday at 11:15 PM
Couldn’t compete with Seedance?
mb194dc today at 6:44 AM
Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable. Reminds of tech bubble 1.
RobRivera yesterday at 10:42 PM
Please name next attempt Roxis
Marazan today at 10:21 AM
Well, gotta hand it to the haters on this one.
1attice yesterday at 11:03 PM
Ed Zitron is going to be all over this
janilowski today at 7:13 AM
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.

shevy-java today at 8:01 AM
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.
gradus_ad yesterday at 10:39 PM
I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in the world is straight up shutting their service down because it's too expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a whole.
thorum yesterday at 11:25 PM
Good day for Kling.
_doctor_love yesterday at 9:17 PM
This move makes a lot of sense to me. It never felt like OpenAI was seriously going to try to launch a video-based social network. It was more of a fun way to demonstrate the power of the video generation models, and also to gauge the market and assess: if you put the power to generate videos in the hands of the people, what kinds of videos will they generate?

So OpenAI has done the right thing as a startup here, gotten lots of training data, and observed lots of user behavior that they can now apply going forward.

The Sora models, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere, and I believe OpenAI will continue to invest in them. They’re getting better and better, just like Google’s Veo, which is quite good at generating videos as well.

Using Codex and agent skills, it’s actually quite easy to generate a storyboard and then have a list of shots in that storyboard. Then generate videos from those storyboard stills, and then finally assemble those individual video files into a final movie file using something like ffmpeg. It's also very easy to create a voiceover with TTS and even simple music using ChatGPT Containers (aka the python tool).

This will 'democratize' (ha ha, for people with money obvi) a lot of video creation going forward. Against all wisdom, I am actually quite bullish on this technology, especially in the hands of young people. They are very creative and have lots of stories to share.

Necessary disclaimer as usual around the ethics of how these models were created: all the AI companies have totally ripped off artists in service of creating these models. I wish something would be done about that but I'm not holding my breath. No politician seems to want to touch it.

ulfw today at 5:50 AM
That company is run about as well as Loopt
cdrnsf yesterday at 10:00 PM
I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.
siliconc0w today at 1:15 PM
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.
sceptic123 today at 4:10 PM
translation: "we got all the data we needed"
paxys yesterday at 10:46 PM
For years now people have been saying Anthropic is falling behind because they don't have an image or video generation model. Turns out it was the right decision all along.
bibimsz yesterday at 11:05 PM
hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
Kye yesterday at 10:32 PM
The only video generation tools showing any real progress or promise are world model-based. That's probably why they did this: either to refocus on coding/cowork type tools (less likely) or to devote that money and compute to building their answer to stuff like Project Genie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE

r0ckarong today at 7:23 AM
Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?
delis-thumbs-7e today at 6:48 AM
Good riddance. Less slop machines the better.
rossjudson today at 12:59 AM
"Sora, generate a video of Mickey Mouse beating up Sam Altman."
eigenvalue today at 3:05 PM
I posted this on X but it’s relevant here, so reposting it:

I had a lot of fun using Sora and got a lot of laughs with absurd videos of me in various situations.

But like everyone else, I kind of got it out of my system after a couple weeks. Not to mention that my family got sick of seeing them. And so my usage collapsed to zero. And that seems to have also been the pattern writ large.

But this kind of flash-in-the-pan dynamic is devastating for a product with this kind of profile, which requires insane amounts of compute hardware to serve while also having no short-term monetization path.

Meta could afford to invest in IG Reels even when it was burning money and costing them a fortune for hardware because it was building up what turned out to be sustainable usage patterns which persisted long after the initial spending ramp.

It’s basically impossible to effectively monetize anything that’s not sustainable on the order of multiple years.

A subscription-based model would see excessively high churn that would be ruinous to the economics, and also advertisers wouldn’t be interested either, for the obvious reasons.

So why couldn’t this work? I don’t think that it was because the models weren’t good enough or that the depictions weren’t realistic or lifelike enough. I still marvel at some of the better outputs I was able to get from Sora.

I think the fundamental problem that Sora faced is actually much broader and more general, and it comes down to the basic Pareto math of any content generation or creative app, which is that 95%+ of the users just want to passively consume content from the 5% or less that actually wants to generate it (and is capable of making anything that other people want to watch).

It was really dismal to see the repetitive, trite ideas that 99% of users generated in the public feed. Just the same few dumb jokes and things they copied from other users.

Or putting themselves in a scene with their favorite fictional or cartoon characters or whatever, which of course got banned pretty quickly for copyright issues.

Most people are not creative and don’t have a lot of original, interesting ideas. So that means that the vast majority of the content is always going to come from a vanishingly small number of creators in a power law distribution.

And those super-creators aren’t going to want to be limited to a simple text-based interface that can only generate for 10 seconds at a time with no continuity and where large portions of things you might want to try are strictly forbidden.

They’ll instead gravitate to more customized solutions for power users that regular users would find as overwhelming to use as AutoCAD.

And that’s what you’re seeing now with all the new viral AI slop videos that are made by a handful of creators who have figured out the workflows and are pumping out the worst junk you can imagine that gets people to click and watch.

Anyway, RIP Sora; it was fun while it lasted. Thanks, Sam, for blowing a few hundred million bucks so we could get some laughs.

elzbardico yesterday at 11:44 PM
Let's be frank, this was probably too fucking expensive to run
bibimsz today at 12:51 AM
we hardly knew ye
ChrisArchitect yesterday at 9:04 PM
an official post

> We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work. – The Sora Team

(https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382)

halyconWays today at 12:06 AM
They need the GPU cycles to help target children to bomb for their new partnership with the US military.
mrcwinn yesterday at 10:18 PM
Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed with very expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an IPO --- oh and not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram that are doing just fine.
blindriver today at 4:05 AM
Sora was good but Gemini is so, so much better. And Seedance is on another dimension. But to be honest I'm shocked that they gave up on AI video. I wonder what the cause of that was?
KnuthIsGod yesterday at 11:58 PM
The press release reads alike OpenAI slop.
nubg yesterday at 11:12 PM
bubble popping
ryguz today at 3:35 PM
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singingwolfboy yesterday at 9:50 PM
pugchat today at 4:12 AM
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WWilliam today at 2:01 AM
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memolife23 today at 6:29 AM
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skillflow_ai yesterday at 11:35 PM
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qqxufo today at 2:59 PM
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LittleOrange today at 10:56 AM
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sriramgonella today at 1:19 AM
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10keane today at 6:10 AM
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vermilingua today at 1:17 AM
Good riddence to bad trash. To me, this idea represents the absolute worst of the AI wave (out of a lot to choose from): a corporate controlled endless stream of the feelies to keep people plugged in and scrolling for nobody’s benefit except those in control of the output. If “entertainment” can be produced algorithmically to a volume and level of quality that the masses find attractive, it’s only a matter of time before bad (worse?) actors take control of it to start highly targeted campaigns of influence, far worse than what we’ve already seen.
teekert yesterday at 10:40 PM
“What you made with Sora mattered”. Idk why that sentence irks me so much. Perhaps because the “how” is bit vague. I like to think that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.
Yash16 today at 4:15 AM
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olalonde today at 12:48 AM
"Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. "

Is it happening? :) /s

linncharm today at 6:53 AM
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aiwokz yesterday at 10:31 PM
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twoodfin yesterday at 10:49 PM
If I were to get conspiracy-minded:

Sora had to be shut down because it was the clearest, most consequential demonstration that OpenAI’s models are running way, way ahead of their ability to align/jail them effectively.

taytus yesterday at 8:35 PM
How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?
dev1ycan today at 12:56 AM
Bahaha.
glass1122 today at 3:49 PM
One of the best news after a long time, LOL!! Sooner or later expecting more good news from all these AI slops and BS. RIP My Friend. never used SORA or even visited the website. LOL!!
CamelCaseName today at 1:56 AM
The owner of @Sora on twitter must be really regretting turning down the $20MM buyout offer for the handle!
atleastoptimal yesterday at 10:57 PM
This will happen with most offerings made by the major AI labs. Inference is expensive, and the closer they get to AGI, the higher the opportunity to use compute for inference rather than training, especially if it’s for making what is essentially entertainment that many people hate on principle.