OpenAI Will Shut Down Sora Video Platform

Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.

It was a weak attempt to keep relevance when faced against Gemini and Claude. But it's completely unnecessary now that OpenAI has contracted with the government. They get all that sweet tax payer money and get to repurpose a ton of GPUs making stupid videos to supporting that new gov contract.

It's not and probably the opposite.

When Sora launched it was way ahead. Seedance 2's release was notably better than any of the other video gen models, Sora included.

The market is getting commoditized because there's no moat and OpenAI hasn't led on pretty much any release for a while now other than Sora, which they're probably falling behind on now.

This is the opposite of a burst from a tech standpoint, even if OpenAI as a company starts to pop.

TL;DR: This is likely happening because the tech accelerated across the industry in ways OpenAI can't catch back up to, not because it's lagging.

this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble

The end of the AI bubble has been beginning for years. The end of the beginning of the end of the bubble might take a few more years.

i agree that AI is a bubble of trash but shutting off a part that wasn't worth the cost is not an indication of an end. They just reduced cost to extend the financial runway. From my point of view text and coding were more popular anyway.

There's a third option this time.

It uses a lot of resources they can use immediately for the military contract that will now inevitably form the backbone of the company and effectively will mean they have won the AI war. Anthropic fumbled by not doing what the military wanted immediately, and showing a minimal backbone publicly.

Finger crossed, my friend! Fingers crossed.

Or 3 massive liability/ lawsuit /investigation about to be announced.

The market for professional video is fairly small, and most of the cost is in sales. ie. the advertising agency, or movie/show pitch that demands the producers get rich independent of production costs.

I think they intend to IPO this year and need to slow the hemorrhaging funds quickly to be more appealing to the stock market.

i heard sora uses around several MW of electricity just for a short 5-20second videos. extremely high cost.

I suspect it's that they got eclipsed by ByteDance with Seedance 2.0.

The video for that model is really good and makes Sora look pretty meh, and it may have been that current work on a next gen Sora wasn't going to be competitive enough.

The worst thing a lab can do right now is look like they are falling behind (i.e. Meta), especially with OpenAI planning for an IPO.

So on top of the lackluster "social media" offering tied to Sora they decided to shutter the entire product line of video and pivot to enterprise (where they've already lost significant market share to Anthropic).

They're in a pretty meh place at the moment overall tbh. I'm skeptical they'll recover.

(But I wouldn't mistake their fumbling for an industry wide shift on AI in general or even video AI.)

Congrats! 🥳🥳🥳

Best I can do is shutting the whole planet down.

Oh it's part of the military machine now. It's never going away now. OpenAI won the war, Anthropic fumbled the ball by not openly capitulating to the fascist state. The competition just hasn't realized it yet.

POP! POP ALREADY!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!

Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with "AI", allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).

There’s also 100 YouTube channels of “real life Pokémon”. What will we ever do without those???

AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.

AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there's just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.

That's aside from the fact that sora could've been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.

Didn't realise you could do it locally, just checked online and there's several options. So why are these fuckers building huge, resource-greedy data centres. . ?

It still is for the creators there. Instead of browsing the algorithm I start on the subscriptions page, to only see uploads from people I actually want to.

There's sometimes complaints about "I thought you were dead" when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time. People just never got recommended the videos despite hitting all the buttons.

For example, did you know both Physics Girl and Tom Scott have returned this month - hopefully a sign that the world can still heal.

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::: spoiler Some unsolicited add-on recommendations -

Ublock origin - beyond the addblocking, I use the picker tool to filter all the extra sections like "news", "trending" "you might like" etc.

Unhook - toggles to disable a bunch of features like comments, home screen, end screen etc.

Enhancer for Youtube - Themeing and a bunch of extra settings like setting defaults for each video. speed, volume, resolution, fill screen (which is different than full screen), PIP while you scroll comments. (The author just did a rework, so it can be a little bugged sometimes - reinstalling it fixed it for me last time it went wonky. :::

Since Tom Scott is coming back soon, that's a clear yes.

It's so they can repurpose that capacity for developing robots. It's not good at all.

OpenAI told the BBC on Wednesday that it has discontinued Sora so that it can focus on other developments, such as robotics "that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks".

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w3e467ewqo

But my Ariel on Vaporean porn is a dream yet to become a reality... (I'm getting old, that is the Pokemon with the weird fetish, right?)

All roads lead to porn eventually when it comes to videos. youtube had to shut down alot of porn/bizarre videos targetting children a few years ago.

Those pathetic AI youtube commercials where there is some fake over muscled geriatric talking about some miracle cure are the worst.
I just close them out. I'm hoping somewhere in youtubes algorithm of suck they are paying attention to how much those ads are hated.

If the audio and video is AI-generated I'm going to assume that the script is, too.

those 15seconds used alot of power, like megawatts.

Cash will lose value just exactly as the money in your account.

Move it to precious metals or assets that historically average flatter value through crashes. The dollar is highly volatile in economic crisis.

I'd do this but its probably the wrong move. I tend to go with the steam method: do nothing while everyone else scrambles, profit.

Or invest in non-US to keep them safe. Like Norwegian funds while the orange is oranging to gain on the oil price boom, and then spread out to European and emerging markets when he has his first public stroke in a few months.

Meh, I'm poor and have no assets at all. Guess I just die.

But are you willing to pay $5 to $10 a roll when you're making a video joke?

Go go China !

Bops the tankie.

Like, I have a Chinese LLM loaded right this second and follow them closely, but holy moly. Curb your enthusiasm.

Anyway, OpenAI has plenty of compute to train a Sora 2 if they want, but apparently they don't. My guess is some combination of:

• They couldn't figure out a more efficient architecture, like you speculated. I buy that. OpenAI's development is way more conservative than you'd think, and video generation is inherently intense, especially if Sora 1 is the baseline.

• ...Maybe they looked at metrics, saw Sora is mostly used for spam, scams, or worse, and pulled the plug for liability reasons?

• They're focusing on short-term profitability, as other commenters mentioned.