20 ms·

Goodbye to Sora

• pm90 7mo ago
  It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
  • EA-3167 7mo ago
    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.
  • ps06756 7mo ago
    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.
    • Ancalagon 7mo ago
      > no audience is going to consume such videos sir, have you seen tiktok?
      • ps06756 7mo ago
        I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full of slop, both AI and human generated
    • emp17344 7mo ago
      So much for “replacing VFX artists”. It’s not necessarily a harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
      • zarzavat 7mo ago
        It's more like the VFX market is too small for OpenAI to bother killing. They are only interested in business models that can justify a trillion dollar valuation.
      • zer00eyz 7mo ago
        > but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong. I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal advice, or medical advice cause I lack the skill and understanding of these fields. Dunning Kruger still applies... There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a vision.
        • ps06756 7mo ago
          True, I did try to make some useful 1 minute videos, and found it really difficult to arrive at a finished product Sure, I can write the screenplay and Veo will generate it for me. But I don't have experience in video creation/production , so it is difficult for me to write good prompts which generate engaging video
    • TaupeRanger 7mo ago
      Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There absolutely is an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the tech will only get better from here.
      • emp17344 7mo ago
        You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use a little more emotional distance here.
    • msy 7mo ago
      Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
    • Morromist 7mo ago
      My girlfriend keeps sending me AI generated tiktoks, despite me complaining about them. To be fair, I've seen literally nothing on tiktok that isn't garbage, so the competition is pretty low. Your point "It looks cool for a while" might have some merit - I think I've seen less and less interest in these things over the last year which fits the news articles I've seen mentioning people got bored of using Sora pretty quickly. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-sora-app-struggling-stellar-164844428.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-sora-app-struggling-st...
      • ps06756 7mo ago
        I didn't compare it with tiktok, because on tiktok majority of the content is slop even if it is human generated, so the bar is pretty low.
        • Morromist 7mo ago
          That is accurate.
    • 2postsperday 7mo ago
      [dead]
  • ignoramous 7mo ago
    > 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 https://x.com/model_mechanic
  • small_model 7mo ago
    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.
  • ahartman00 7mo ago
    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-coding-tool-went-rogue-now-theyre-hitting-the-brakes-2h7p https://dev.to/tyson_cung/amazon-lost-63m-orders-after-ai-co... 2. https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confused-deputy-iam-identity-governance-matrix https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confuse... 3. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366
• aarjaneiro 7mo ago
  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.
• skillflow_ai 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Marazan 7mo ago
  Well, gotta hand it to the haters on this one.
• throw03172019 7mo ago
  Couldn’t compete with Seedance?
  • karunamurti 7mo ago
    Seedance just launched, but they nerfed it. I guess so it can't generate things with preexisting IP.
• strongpigeon 7mo ago
  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.
• throw4847285 7mo ago
  Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago? https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/ https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
  • moralestapia 7mo ago
    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.
    • password54321 7mo ago
      They are just cancelling side projects because Anthropic is dominating in enterprise and side projects (probably) don't make profit. https://x.com/ShanuMathew93/status/2031074311629353299 https://x.com/ShanuMathew93/status/2031074311629353299
      • timpera 7mo ago
        This data is pretty questionable. OpenAI employees have said on Twitter that it does not account for ChatGPT Enterprise, where most of their growth is, which is quote-only and not paid by credit card.
      • sethops1 7mo ago
        I would point out Anthropic isn't profitable either (yet), it's just that enterprise is where the money is. Now that all the AI companies are narrowing in on that market, becoming profitable will be even more challenging.
    • radicality 7mo ago
      You have more info about the inflated token use? I’m using codex cli a bunch now, but the reported token usage seems like an order of magnitude higher than, say Claude code with opus. Idk if it’s because I set codex to xhigh reasoning, but even then it still seems way higher than Claude. The input/output ratio feels large too, eg I have codex session which says ~500M in / ~2M out.
• mcast 7mo ago
  I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!
  • 2001zhaozhao 7mo ago
    We need a 'killed by OpenAI' site now
    • al_borland 7mo ago
      This could be taken two ways. 1. OpenAI killing off their own products aggressively, taking a page from Google’s book. (I think the way you meant it) 2. Products/companies that no longer exist because OpenAI, or AI in general, made them obsolete. (My first instinct when reading it)
      • blharr 7mo ago
        >Products/companies that no longer exist because OpenAI, or AI in general, made them obsolete What would you place here anyways? Chegg and Stack Overflow?
        • al_borland 7mo ago
          This was more speaking to the hype of what people say AI is going to do, more so than the realities of what it's actually done so far.
      • quesera 7mo ago
        3. A Memorial Wall for those who have mistaken ChatGPT for a therapist
  • ignoramous 7mo ago
    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-research-profitability-profile-2026-3 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-officer-to-lead-science-discovery-group/ https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...
• ronsor 7mo ago
  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.
  • hexage1814 7mo ago
    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.
    • ronsor 7mo ago
      Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for. Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
      • nomel 7mo ago
        > Local-first is definitely the way. i think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a datacenter. this has been the case for a long while now, and will increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.
• nprz 7mo ago
  Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models surpassing Sora's capabilities?
• taytus 7mo ago
  How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?
  • digitalsushi 7mo ago
    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.
• noemit 7mo ago
  I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)
• helsinkiandrew 7mo ago
  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.
  • oro44 7mo ago
    Stating the obvious but spraying and praying is not a strategy
• arkadiytehgraet 7mo ago
  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.
• iainctduncan 7mo ago
  You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...
  • tyleo 7mo ago
    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)
• Imnimo 7mo ago
  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.
  • 2001zhaozhao 7mo ago
    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.
    • QuantumNomad_ 7mo ago
      I generated a fair number of videos with Sora, and used a handful of those and edited them outside of Sora for a couple of short TikTok videos. Never once did I bother to browse videos made by others on Sora itself. I wonder if anyone did.
      • johanyc 7mo ago
        Same. I pretty much only watch videos I generate.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• timpera 7mo ago
  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.
• ChrisArchitect 7mo ago
  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 https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382)
• password54321 7mo ago
  "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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
  • MyFirstSass 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • bibimsz 7mo ago
      Software engineers have spent the last 40 years automating away other people's jobs. The discomfort only seems to start when the automation points inward.
      • bibimsz 7mo ago
        [flagged]
      • al_borland 7mo ago
        I want to make people’s jobs easier and more interesting, I never want to make them redundant. This did happen once. 3 people were laid off, I think directly based on things I said to drive the completion of some automation. That was the last time I ever measured something in man-hours to make a point. I’ll never do it again. That was over 12 years ago.
      • skydhash 7mo ago
        Haven't mechanical engineers done the same thing (steam engines, trains,...)? The whole applied science is about using knowledge to remove tediousness (and now adding it back). A lot of jobs have been removed.
        • 7mo ago
• softwaredoug 7mo ago
  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.
• Sir_Twist 7mo ago
  > 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?
  • mjr00 7mo ago
    > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".
    • lossyalgo 7mo ago
      To nitpick a tiny bit, from Wikipedia[0]: > In February 2024, OpenAI previewed examples of its output to the public,[1] with the first generation of Sora released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in the US and Canada in December 2024[2][3] and the second generation, Sora 2, was released to select users in the US and Canada at the end of September 2025. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
• _doctor_love 7mo ago
  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.
  • ronsor 7mo ago
    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.
    • _doctor_love 7mo ago
      Yes, sadly, the West is not the leader. The work done by the Chinese labs is just so damn good.
  • msabalau 7mo ago
    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.
• mikhmha 7mo ago
  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..
• harlequinetcie 7mo ago
  Are we sure it was in that order?
• singingwolfboy 7mo ago
  https://archive.ph/ABkeI https://archive.ph/ABkeI
• poemxo 7mo ago
  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.
  • vunderba 7mo ago
    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.
• cdrnsf 7mo ago
  I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.
  • dawnerd 7mo ago
    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.
    • AkelaA 7mo ago
      AI art as a whole has just become the new clipart. The fact that it’s effortless to produce just means that it has no real artistic value, and by using it all you’re signifying to people is that you’re too cheap to pay someone to create real art. It’s quickly become the modern day equivalent of Comic Sans, WordArt, and the default clipart illustrations included in Word ‘98.
      • k3k3 7mo ago
        I dunno about you... but it boggles my mind how many others can't see it. Perhaps most people are absolutely devoid of any taste of what makes art? I dont know.
        • vortegne 7mo ago
          Techbros, largely, never had any taste to begin with. They just also don't have the skills/will to make any art, so they could hide their lack of taste for a long time. That said, there are still people with exceptional aesthetic sensibilities in the tech field, obviously. They're just largely not in this space.
• latchkey 7mo ago
  What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
  • ZiiS 7mo ago
    They get to use if for services with better returns.
• PLenz 7mo ago
  This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
  • yabutlivnWoods 7mo ago
    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.
• ex-aws-dude 7mo ago
  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"
  • echelon 7mo ago
    > 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.
    • tantalor 7mo ago
      > look at US top videos on YouTube any given day I'd rather eat poison
      • echelon 7mo ago
        We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture. Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest. It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP. I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a social network has to renegotiate their IP license. People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0. People want to generate IP. edit: clarity
• mrcwinn 7mo ago
  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.
  • miltonlost 7mo ago
    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?
    • saalweachter 7mo ago
      Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do it, and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove and preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-touching initiative?
    • k3k3 7mo ago
      I think OAI is suffering from the Meta-effect. That is, hiring Meta-exec's who focus on gaming numbers with no care nor sensibility of product. Wild really. Well done Sam.
  • Morromist 7mo ago
    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?
• wj 7mo ago
  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.
• aiwokz 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• Kye 7mo ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE
• foolfoolz 7mo ago
  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
  • jimmytucson 7mo ago
    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.
    • TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
      This isn't a solvable problem without world models. Tokenised prompting is like stabbing a pin at a huge target in the dark. Sometimes something interesting falls out, but latent space doesn't have the definition to give most people exactly what they want. When it does, it's more likely to be something popular and unoriginal, where the data is dense, and less likely to be something inventive and strange.
      • xienze 7mo ago
        > This isn't a solvable problem without world models. I wish we could use something like a simple DSL rather than English prose to work with these models, in order to have some real precision to describe what we want.
        • asnyder 7mo ago
          Nothing stops that from happening. Just needs to be trained in that DSL. Though at that point it returns to it's original form as a better autocomplete/IntelliSense :). That will likely happen in the specialized fields. We can already see tools like Figma, Mira, and others that generate functional-ish frontend components in full typescript and corresponding styles (that are also selectable and configurable in the interface). Though, not quite as free, since they do load their base framework and components to ensure consistency and sanity / error-checking, etc., but even then it is in fact generating you useable, modifiable components that you can engage with in precision in your normal DSL. For video, this likely exists, or is being worked on as we speak. All specialized domain tools will go towards this model to allow those domain experts to use the tools with the precision they expect AND the agentic gains we already take for granted.
• creantum 7mo ago
  It was the greatest thing yesterday.
• gradus_ad 7mo ago
  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.
  • paxys 7mo ago
    It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.
    • bloppe 7mo ago
      I sure hope not, otherwise they're screwed
      • oblio 7mo ago
        > they're screwed Fixed that for you :-)
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • BoredPositron 7mo ago
    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.
  • atleastoptimal 7mo ago
    Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
    • emp17344 7mo ago
      Too bad they aren’t doing either!
• Olumde 7mo ago
  VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
  • willis936 7mo ago
    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.
    • Permit 7mo ago
      I feel like in several years we’ll have much more capable video generation than Sora was capable of and we won’t look back at all.
      • emp17344 7mo ago
        I feel like you’re wrong. This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply unpopular.
        • Permit 7mo ago
          We’re just replaying the CGI debate from the 2010s. It was popular to hate on CGI because it was obvious and bad and low quality and practical effects were better because of… We learned two things from this debate: 1. What most people hated was actually just “bad CGI”. Good CGI went entirely unnoticed. 2. A generation of people were raised with CGI present in almost every form of professional media (i.e. not social media). They didn’t have a preference for practical effects because the content they consumed didn’t really use them. I expect the same thing to happen here. I don’t think many people want to consume AI generated content exlusively (like Sora’s app attempted). However I expect AI generated content to continue to improve in quality until it’s used as a component in most media we consume. You and I will eventually stop noticing it and kids will be raised with it as normal and the anti-AI millennials/GenX crowd will age-out of relevance.
          • 7mo ago
• teekert 7mo ago
  “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.
  • wat10000 7mo ago
    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.
  • MengerSponge 7mo ago
    I think of the medical definition when people use LLMs to "express" themselves: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/express https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/express
    • hammock 7mo ago
      That is the original meaning of the word (cf espresso etc)
  • abcde666777 7mo ago
    Typical PR speak.
  • moregrist 7mo ago
    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.
  • slg 7mo ago
    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.
• RobRivera 7mo ago
  Please name next attempt Roxis
  • Forgeties79 7mo ago
    Roxas*! Important because it’s sora rearranged (with an X for cool factor)
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• xnx 7mo ago
  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.
  • 4k0hz 7mo ago
    Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.
• paxys 7mo ago
  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.
• twoodfin 7mo ago
  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.
  • emp17344 7mo ago
    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.
    • twoodfin 7mo ago
      Not “take over the world” level misalignment. I mean, “We can’t assuredly prevent our models from generating unlicensed IP or degrading pornography without blunt approaches that alienate our core audience”.
  • yulker 7mo ago
    probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't have much in common with llms
  • code_biologist 7mo ago
    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.
  • bloppe 7mo ago
    What did Sora do?
• Yizahi 7mo ago
  A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)
• atleastoptimal 7mo ago
  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.
  • davebranton 7mo ago
    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.
    • atleastoptimal 7mo ago
      agi just means a machine, system or whatever that can do anything as least as well as a human. The details dont matter as much as its ability to match humans in everything they are paid money to do. And obviously if such a system existed, the benefits (and risks) would be enormous, though the risks are smaller if you control it vs someone else, which is why every company is racing towards it.
    • supern0va 7mo ago
      >Will the machine dream? You seem to be mixing up intelligence and consciousness. Not only does intelligence exist outside of humans, and even mammals, but it exists outside of brains and even neurons. For example, slime molds have fascinating problem solving abilities: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811 It is clear that whatever we are...creating/growing with LLMs, it is very unlike human intelligence, but it is nonetheless some type of intelligence.
• dwroberts 7mo ago
  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?
  • amelius 7mo ago
    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.
• AlexAplin 7mo ago
  Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/ 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.
  • paxys 7mo ago
    The app isn’t shutting down today, so they may have decided that the write up is still useful.
    • repeekad 7mo ago
      More likely the team who put a lot of work into it were unaware of the decision to kill the product, regardless of the final sunset date, until today.
      • janalsncm 7mo ago
        The document seems to be an updated version of something written last September. From a quick glance it’s not really a major overhaul.
      • noisy_boy 7mo ago
        It's 8 paragraphs of iteration over the previous version. ChatGPT is probably among the authors.
  • bibimsz 7mo ago
    i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than vice versa
    • blackflame7000 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • bandrami 7mo ago
• 1attice 7mo ago
  Ed Zitron is going to be all over this
  • GolfPopper 7mo ago
    Really he already was, back in August 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
• bibimsz 7mo ago
  hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
• overgard 7mo ago
  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..
• nubg 7mo ago
  bubble popping
• thorum 7mo ago
  Good day for Kling.
• mrdependable 7mo ago
  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.
• small_model 7mo ago
  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)
  • TheOtherHobbes 7mo ago
    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.
    • dyauspitr 7mo ago
      I still like it as a general search engine and everyday LLM over Gemini. Maybe I’m just used to the style.
      • apsurd 7mo ago
        agree it's becoming my new default search engine. But it is actively getting worse in a distasteful sense: Want to hear the one TRICK most people forget when doing X...?
        • zeroonetwothree 7mo ago
          Yes, every response ends with that. Why did they set it up that way?
          • andoando 7mo ago
            To try and get continued usage. They no doubt A/B tested the shit out of this and saw it gets higher responses
          • ngcazz 7mo ago
            It's quite transparently a trick to prolong engagement with the app, just as pretty much any internet product which aims to maximize the LTV extracted from the user base.
• born-jre 7mo ago
  Noo, they are taking it to loopt land
• meken 7mo ago
  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.
  • 1bpp 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Waterluvian 7mo ago
      I think you’re fumbling on an important distinction. Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting. To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
      • apsurd 7mo ago
        I get your point but it goes too far in the opposite direction. We should now discuss absolutely nothing in relation to Sora and genAI videos? That seems overly charitable to the platform.
        • Waterluvian 7mo ago
          Here, let me try this approach: Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub. Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and speaking the subsequent comment, word for word. No seriously, try it out.
          • apsurd 7mo ago
• elzbardico 7mo ago
  Let's be frank, this was probably too fucking expensive to run
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• KnuthIsGod 7mo ago
  The press release reads alike OpenAI slop.
• jmugan 7mo ago
  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.
• halyconWays 7mo ago
  They need the GPU cycles to help target children to bomb for their new partnership with the US military.
• bandrami 7mo ago
  And this kills the Disney deal: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-shutting-down-sora-ai-video-app-1236546187/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
• yalogin 7mo ago
  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
  • Frieren 7mo ago
    > 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?
    • techgnosis 7mo ago
      Consumers never pay for stuff on the internet. FB, Insta, TikTok, Google products, Reddit, Snapchat. This is not a new realization that OpenAI is having.
    • yalogin 7mo ago
      Consumers have always paid with data not money. That is just how we are groomed. In fact that is more valuable to companies as it turns out. Sora though doesn’t work that way, it costs the company a lot with no useful data for them. It was always a vehicle to raise the company’s image and nothing else. The only way it’s useful for them is to show the user count to investors in their next funding round. Served no other purpose, but the market changed around them.
      • solid_fuel 7mo ago
        "always" is doing a lot of work here. Just 20 years ago I think consumers largely paid with money, not personal data.
        • deleted 7mo ago
          [deleted]
      • Frieren 7mo ago
• ctdinjeu5 7mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• yoyohello13 7mo ago
  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.
• cdrnsf 7mo ago
  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?
• olalonde 7mo ago
  "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
• bschwindHN 7mo ago
  Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.
  • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
    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.
    • Forgeties79 7mo ago
      Video production is already wildly democratized. AI did not lower the barrier to entry. Digital tools already did most of the legwork.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
    • bschwindHN 7mo ago
      Nah, that's not the "proper" way to think about it, that's just your opinion. As it stands today, AI video generation tools like Sora suck up useful energy and produce things that are useless at best (throwaway short form videos), and harmful at worst (propaganda, deepfakes). Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.
      • iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
        So only rich people can propagandize? How is that better?
        • bigyabai 7mo ago
          OpenAI never gave the community the weights. They always intended to monopolize it for corporate extortion, they didn't "democratize" shit.
• bibimsz 7mo ago
  we hardly knew ye
• bananamogul 7mo ago
  So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app? There's a web interface as well.
• dev1ycan 7mo ago
  Bahaha.
• oliyoung 7mo ago
  So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app
• rossjudson 7mo ago
  "Sora, generate a video of Mickey Mouse beating up Sam Altman."
• max_ 7mo ago
  Relevant Music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLhXesNkCI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLhXesNkCI
• agnishom 7mo ago
  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.
• cyberge99 7mo ago
  Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of Florida. Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis political attacks.
• vermilingua 7mo ago
  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.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • nomel 7mo ago
    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.
    • rogerrogerr 7mo ago
      I feel like taking in GenAI content, even if it makes me laugh, probably does something bad to my brain. It looks like real life, but the physics is just wrong in ways that range from obvious to very subtle. I don’t want to feed my brain videos of things that look photorealistic but do not depict reality, that just seems foolish somehow. Like, imagine if you watched a bunch of GenAI videos of cars sliding on ice from the driver’s perspective. The physics is wrong, and surely it’s going to make you a worse driver because you are feeding your internal prediction engine incorrect training data. It’s less likely that you’ll make the right prediction in real life when it counts.
• sriramgonella 7mo ago
  [dead]
• rfarley04 7mo ago
  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.
  • tracerbulletx 7mo ago
    I don't think so. Disney is ending their deal with them, it sounds like they're exiting video generation as a business.
  • afavour 7mo ago
    According to WSJ they’re getting out of the video game entirely: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-video-platform-app-a82a9e4e https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
• davidham 7mo ago
  I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.
• didip 7mo ago
  The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI cannot even protect THAT moat properly.
• johnfn 7mo ago
  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?
  • iAMkenough 7mo ago
    > 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.
    • iAMkenough 7mo ago
      I'm also curious if Sora has been used by Iran to generate those Lego propaganda videos critical of the President. Given how close Sam Altman is with the current administration, I wouldn't be surprised if Sora is now reserved for U.S. government propaganda only. Might be why the latest Iran propaganda video could be created in PowerPoint: https://bsky.app/profile/rachelbitecofer.bsky.social/post/3mhqknsef3s2b https://bsky.app/profile/rachelbitecofer.bsky.social/post/3m...
• CamelCaseName 7mo ago
  The owner of @Sora on twitter must be really regretting turning down the $20MM buyout offer for the handle!
  • r0fl 7mo ago
    No way anyone is that stupid That story can’t be true
    • efilife 7mo ago
      Can't find anything about this
      • CamelCaseName 7mo ago
        My apologies, you are right, I was misled, it is not true. Unfortunately I can no longer edit/delete my original comment.
• razvan_maftei 7mo ago
  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.
• WWilliam 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• 152334H 7mo ago
  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.
• dcchambers 7mo ago
  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.
• ionwake 7mo ago
  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
  • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    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.
    • exodust 7mo ago
      > there are people who pay $300 a month for Grok to generate AI Porn. Did you just make that up? Grok barely makes "M-rated" nudity, let alone porn. Musk recently claimed it can do "R-Rated content", but his post got a community note saying otherwise. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031989543529038103 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031989543529038103
      • raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        You haven’t been over to r/grok_porn… Grok has gotten a lot stricter about video from uploaded images. But it is still able to make realistic x rated porn from AI generated images it creates. There are various jailbreaks that have been working for the longest and still work, just a brief look, half of them just involve “anime borders” and “transparent anime watermarks” over videos.
• fraywing 7mo ago
  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).
  • cpt_sobel 7mo ago
    What market? I thought the whole point was that Sora at the end of the day couldn't find a way to generate revenue
• npn 7mo ago
  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.
• aldousd666 7mo ago
  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.
• wg0 7mo ago
  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.
• reassess_blind 7mo ago
  Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?
• mancerayder 7mo ago
  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?
• umich2025 7mo ago
  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
• blindriver 7mo ago
  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?
• pugchat 7mo ago
  [dead]
• Yash16 7mo ago
  [dead]
• maplethorpe 7mo ago
  RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.
  • wraptile 7mo ago
    Really? A video meme generator is making your top evil products list?
    • 3form 7mo ago
      Very little potential to be used for good and quite some potential to be used for bad. I think the ratio is particularly damning, rather than the total evil.
      • hbn 7mo ago
        This is just a product that offers access to a model, and they did as much as they could to make sure it didn't output anything non-kosher. Video gen is going nowhere, and there's already models out there with less safety measures. So there's no RIP to the evil product.
    • Capricorn2481 7mo ago
      You're being willfully blind to how video generation platforms like this are already being used.
  • lnenad 7mo ago
    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.
    • zemo 7mo ago
      violence at scale is often facilitated by and preceded by propaganda at scale, which is one of Sora’s only applications. Certain things are obvious to normal people, like “propaganda is real, powerful, bad, and historical of enormous significance”.
• nashtik 7mo ago
  For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming table tennis player
• throwaw12 7mo ago
  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.
• daikon899 7mo ago
  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.
  • tefkah 7mo ago
    shut up bot
• hnlyman 7mo ago
  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.
• StarterPro 7mo ago
  So long and good riddance.
• tabs_or_spaces 7mo ago
  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.
• ChimpWithHat 7mo ago
  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.
• ulfw 7mo ago
  That company is run about as well as Loopt
• steveharing1 7mo ago
  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.
• _jdtm 7mo ago
  [dead]
• memolife23 7mo ago
  [dead]
• _fin6 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  • HerbManic 7mo ago
    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.
• bbayer 7mo ago
  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.
• mb194dc 7mo ago
  Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable. Reminds of tech bubble 1.
• delis-thumbs-7e 7mo ago
  Good riddance. Less slop machines the better.
• linncharm 7mo ago
  [dead]
• janilowski 7mo ago
  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.
• r0ckarong 7mo ago
  Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?
• cmiles8 7mo ago
  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
• shevy-java 7mo ago
  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.
• wiseowise 7mo ago
  First domino falls?
• weezing 7mo ago
  Nothing of value was lost.
• asim 7mo ago
  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.
  • unnamed76ri 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • Rechtsstaat 7mo ago
      I'd argue that for informal uses like HN, this is very much okay! It's grammatically correct and gets the point across. And most importantly, these paragraphs read more like someone's personal voice than some pithy but edited-to-death couple of sentences.
• vivzkestrel 7mo ago
  - gary marcus is going to have a field day with this one
• LittleOrange 7mo ago
  [dead]
• malbs 7mo ago
  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.
• nnevatie 7mo ago
  Good riddance.
• siliconc0w 7mo ago
  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.
• christianqchung 7mo ago
  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.
• epolanski 7mo ago
  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?
• endofreach 7mo ago
  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…
• softwaredoug 7mo ago
  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?
  • nemomarx 7mo ago
    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.
• imadch 7mo ago
  What a decision , maybe it's not profitable or they are preparing for something big ? i don't think OpenAI will lose like this
• qqxufo 7mo ago
  [dead]
• nighwatch 7mo ago
  With Sora stepping back like this, it seems like the perfect opening for ByteDance to step in and capture the market with Seedance 2.
• deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
• eigenvalue 7mo ago
  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.
• qqxufo1 7mo ago
  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.
• whywhywhywhy 7mo ago
  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.
• ryguz 7mo ago
  [dead]
• glass1122 7mo ago
  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!!
• sceptic123 7mo ago
  translation: "we got all the data we needed"
• KevinMS 7mo ago
  Its looking like Michael Jackson stealing KFC will be the peak of AI
• georaa 7mo ago
  [flagged]
• Halian 7mo ago
  Good riddance to bad garbage.
• p0w3n3d 7mo ago
  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.
  • ynx0 7mo ago
    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.
    • p0w3n3d 7mo ago
      however the forensic or semi-forensic tools should be given to people to help them verify the videos. On the other hand I suspect that these tools are not released so wrongdoers are not able to test their fakes against the tools (security by obscurity)
• theropost 7mo ago
  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 :(
• dalvrosa 7mo ago
  What are the best replacements?
• semiinfinitely 7mo ago
  YEET
• mcs_ 7mo ago
  I’ve never tried it, do you think I’m missing something? If yes, what has it brought into your life? Was it just entertainment?
• chrysoprace 7mo ago
  Hopefully this means less misinformation and slop on social media, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.
• timosterhus 7mo ago
  After seeing SeeDance generate multiple sequences of correct-looking hand-to-hand fight choreography, I'm more surprised they didn't take Sora down sooner.
• JohannesCortez 7mo ago
  Was Sora even profitable in the first place?
• MrTomatoes 7mo ago
  It's a shame they're closing it, but luckily it won't be a brainrot, but it's still a shame.
• wei03288 7mo ago
  [dead]
• sta1n 7mo ago
  [dead]
• borgai 6mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6SoQkikf_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6SoQkikf_E