Technology

OpenAI said it will discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024, without providing a reason for the decision.

That is the strongest indication this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble. Sora burned a ton of processing power, with no clear value proposition, just to keep the hype cycle going a little longer. Shutting down without explanation leaves the most likely one: they are out of helium to pump into the balloon. And if that balloon isn't inflating, it's deflating.

Chime in if you disagreee, but there's really only 2 reasons a company like OpenAI shuts down a core service like Sora:

• The service is hemorrhaging money to the point of financial unsustainability.
• The service is not popular enough to drive investor hype as a "loss leader"

We already know that OpenAI is losing money on their generative "AI" products across the board, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, and the economic woes that come from rising hardware prices, oil and gas shortages, and another pointless war in the middle east only make the situation worse for them money-wise.

And so that really just leaves me to conclude that Sora has not maintained the level of popularity and growth needed to impress investors as Q1 comes to a close. Whether it's users, subscriptions, or time, they must have looked at the numbers and really didn't like what they saw.

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the ridiculous "AI" bubble, and the start of a new tech sector correction.

As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I've gotten this year.

Why stop there? Just shut the whole company down.

Oooooohhhh is it starting? I hope it’s starting 🤩

Best news I've heard all day! POP THE SLOP

GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let's hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.

But muh slop

you mean giving away billions of dollars of computer with no monetisation strategy was bad? man who would have thought. not sam, apparently. if only there were like, some way to have realised that the goal of business is to earn money

In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.

We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.

Everybody else gets dropped on the floor.

Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way

All people ever did with sora was make doorbell cam footage of dogs watergunning old ladies and gorillas getting sucked into tornados. AI image and video generation is just a tool to make a funny joke, it's incapable of doing anything serious in its current state, and with the amount of processing power it needs just to be a digital circus clown it's unlikely to become anything more.

So youtube will be worth watching again right?

Right?

So many people seem to have no idea what they're talking about. This isn't ending AI video creation, it just cost them a lot of money to offer it. You can generate a video on your own computer already. AI video isn't going away because one company isn't letting people do it on their servers for free any more.

Finally, a good news

Don't worry, I'm sure we'll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won't be coming back.

I'd bet money that the Disney deal falling through was because OpenAI couldn't guarantee that Sora couldn't be used to generate porn of their characters, since attackers will almost certainly always find new prompt injections.

Surprise surprise, it's a giant fucking black box that you can never have complete control over.

my guess is that ai video is not going away, and that sora was largely an expensive marketing project

I think one of the reasons why consumer facing AI content is failing so bad is because we have had good video content for decades so it’s super obvious when a video is just off.

I think this relates to the main reason why AI is failing (or at least not popular with consumers). It automatically just means the product has less quality than you’ve been used to for your entire life. It hasn’t really provided anything new to consumers.

Bye Felicia

Could this mean less wholly AI generated videos on YouTube? Please be so.

Openai is the canary

It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn't be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.

But now that's Google and Grok's problems, I guess.