4 ms·

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

by 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...
  - torginus 7mo ago
    I don't think so. There are tons of self hosted models for video (they are smaller and easier to run). Most people serious about this stuff usually have their own pipelines.
    - iAMkenough 7mo ago
      I'm not sure, but you could be right. Sora is/was the top-of-the-line platform for video generation, and the Lego IP videos were polished. Makes sense to outsource when your own energy grid is being destroyed. Anyone with an account and VPN could utilize the platform. I'd like to know what self hosted models they've been using, if any, and who provided them, trained on Lego IP.
    - iAMkenough 7mo ago
      Since you seem to be better informed, I'm also interested in what self hosted models for video you recommend for creating my own Lego movie clips now that Sora is no longer an option for a paid service. There's tons, right?
      - pavlov 7mo ago
        Look up Wan and Hunyan for starters. These are open weight models, so you can fine tune them on Lego content… But presumably they already have enough training data since they were made by Chinese companies who don’t give a shit about Western IP rights.
  - pjc50 7mo ago
    Are there known tells that could be used to determine which model the video came from? (This sort of question, and the Grok sexual abuse, is why I'd like to see mandatory invisible watermarks on generated images/video)
mortsnort 7mo ago
Hosting videos is really expensive. AI video generation inference is really expensive. I'd love to see how much money this experiment cost.
- rblatz 7mo ago
  So much that they walked away from a billion dollar deal with Disney by dropping Sora.
  - riffraff 7mo ago
    It's not clear to me what that billion dollar meant. To me it seems it was "Disney gets shares and we get to use their characters in Sora". Even if Sora breaks even, why would you gift Disney stock? It's not like they actual gave 1B to openai.
  - lossyalgo 7mo ago
    I don't think anyone outside of Disney/ClosedAI knows what deal was actually made. Maybe they just shut down public use of Sora but Disney will still be able to use it internally? Maybe they never even signed anything, as is too often the case with AI deals, especially big ones, how we read about signed/inked deals but then it turns out it was all just words spoken. Maybe they took the cash, then shut Sora down to save money? Could be any number of things that happened which we might never know.
- karel-3d 7mo ago
  Hosting videos is not that expensive, compared to generation and inference costs. It's not cheap but it's not that horrible
AussieWog93 7mo ago
For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person. I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives. He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too. Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too. Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.
- username223 7mo ago
  Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.
  - waterproof 7mo ago
    > the things he does. The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?
    - rustystump 7mo ago
      A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it wasnt him, it would be someone else.
- Eufrat 7mo ago
  Multiple people have attested that Sam Altman is extremely charming (especially in more casual, intimate settings) and talks very nobly about his goals, but his actual work is just…all kinds of awful. And I think that charm only goes so far as it seems clear that people are starting to demand that OpenAI actually match its words with work it cannot produce. I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied to the board, his obsession with retinal scanning everyone for his biometric cryptocurrency (Worldcoin), how he left Y Combinator are just evidence that he’s not very heroic. Most cringe to me is that he and many others seem aware that what their are doing is corrosive and harmful to society on some level as Altman has admitted to having a bunker somewhere around Big Sur [0]. Which…WTF. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
nananana9 7mo ago
What happened is that they make no money, because people use it an masse to generate videos that they then post on TikTok and Instagram, nobody actually doomscrolls Sora.
cess11 7mo ago
"I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown" I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear that they were never going to be able to deliver on this. Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent. Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be possible to copyright, which is their core business.
- DrewADesign 7mo ago
  Every studio that made video content using AI video generation — think those all come commercials— basically just generated and regenerated the same few-second clips until they got an acceptable one. Hundreds and hundreds of times. I would be astonished if it would have been cheaper than actual CGI had the generation not been so heavily subsidized, and the product sucked.
  - DrewADesign 7mo ago
    *Coke commercials
imankulov 7mo ago
> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed, apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued a metric. At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!
greenie_beans 7mo ago
> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer yes"
hbn 7mo ago
> Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified. They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.
FrontierProject 7mo ago
[dead]
mvdtnz 7mo ago
> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as fast as possible. I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user, especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get you to follow up with more. > What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors? > For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900 commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be replaced. > (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points) > If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800, RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and what typical wear looks like. The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you want" follow ups are so annoying.

by johnfn 7mo ago

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...
- torginus 7mo ago
  I don't think so. There are tons of self hosted models for video (they are smaller and easier to run). Most people serious about this stuff usually have their own pipelines.
  - iAMkenough 7mo ago
    I'm not sure, but you could be right. Sora is/was the top-of-the-line platform for video generation, and the Lego IP videos were polished. Makes sense to outsource when your own energy grid is being destroyed. Anyone with an account and VPN could utilize the platform. I'd like to know what self hosted models they've been using, if any, and who provided them, trained on Lego IP.
  - iAMkenough 7mo ago
    Since you seem to be better informed, I'm also interested in what self hosted models for video you recommend for creating my own Lego movie clips now that Sora is no longer an option for a paid service. There's tons, right?
    - pavlov 7mo ago
      Look up Wan and Hunyan for starters. These are open weight models, so you can fine tune them on Lego content… But presumably they already have enough training data since they were made by Chinese companies who don’t give a shit about Western IP rights.
- pjc50 7mo ago
  Are there known tells that could be used to determine which model the video came from? (This sort of question, and the Grok sexual abuse, is why I'd like to see mandatory invisible watermarks on generated images/video)

mortsnort 7mo ago

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

rblatz 7mo ago
So much that they walked away from a billion dollar deal with Disney by dropping Sora.
- riffraff 7mo ago
  It's not clear to me what that billion dollar meant. To me it seems it was "Disney gets shares and we get to use their characters in Sora". Even if Sora breaks even, why would you gift Disney stock? It's not like they actual gave 1B to openai.
- lossyalgo 7mo ago
  I don't think anyone outside of Disney/ClosedAI knows what deal was actually made. Maybe they just shut down public use of Sora but Disney will still be able to use it internally? Maybe they never even signed anything, as is too often the case with AI deals, especially big ones, how we read about signed/inked deals but then it turns out it was all just words spoken. Maybe they took the cash, then shut Sora down to save money? Could be any number of things that happened which we might never know.
karel-3d 7mo ago
Hosting videos is not that expensive, compared to generation and inference costs. It's not cheap but it's not that horrible

AussieWog93 7mo ago

For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person. I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives. He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too. Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too. Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.

username223 7mo ago
Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.
- waterproof 7mo ago
  > the things he does. The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?
  - rustystump 7mo ago
    A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it wasnt him, it would be someone else.
Eufrat 7mo ago
Multiple people have attested that Sam Altman is extremely charming (especially in more casual, intimate settings) and talks very nobly about his goals, but his actual work is just…all kinds of awful. And I think that charm only goes so far as it seems clear that people are starting to demand that OpenAI actually match its words with work it cannot produce. I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied to the board, his obsession with retinal scanning everyone for his biometric cryptocurrency (Worldcoin), how he left Y Combinator are just evidence that he’s not very heroic. Most cringe to me is that he and many others seem aware that what their are doing is corrosive and harmful to society on some level as Altman has admitted to having a bunker somewhere around Big Sur [0]. Which…WTF. [0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

nananana9 7mo ago

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

cess11 7mo ago

"I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown" I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear that they were never going to be able to deliver on this. Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent. Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be possible to copyright, which is their core business.

DrewADesign 7mo ago
Every studio that made video content using AI video generation — think those all come commercials— basically just generated and regenerated the same few-second clips until they got an acceptable one. Hundreds and hundreds of times. I would be astonished if it would have been cheaper than actual CGI had the generation not been so heavily subsidized, and the product sucked.
- DrewADesign 7mo ago
  *Coke commercials

imankulov 7mo ago

> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed, apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued a metric. At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!

greenie_beans 7mo ago

> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer yes"

hbn 7mo ago

> Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too mystified. They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's all it had to do.

FrontierProject 7mo ago

[dead]

mvdtnz 7mo ago

> I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as fast as possible. I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user, especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get you to follow up with more. > What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors? > For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900 commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be replaced. > (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points) > If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800, RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and what typical wear looks like. The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you want" follow ups are so annoying.