Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried and 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.
muskstinks 26 seconds ago [-]
For OpenAI that was and felt like some side husle they were playing around nothing more.
Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.
At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.
unnamed76ri 6 minutes ago [-]
Hopefully this truth benefits you: write concise sentences.
It will benefit you personally and professionally.
meken 10 hours 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.
yoz-y 2 hours ago [-]
The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody else’s creations when I can do mine.”
Cthulhu_ 44 minutes ago [-]
I can see some usage for this use case - "look Morty, I turned myself into a pickle!" - but just like image / meme generators, this is like 10-30 seconds of engagement within a friend circle at best (although some might go viral, but that won't bring in much money for in this case OpenAI).
There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.
muzani 2 hours ago [-]
They're different impulses. Some want to consume. Others want to create.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
jaapz 1 hours ago [-]
> Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist.
The musician in me just shed a tear
delta_p_delta_x 50 minutes ago [-]
> the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music
I wonder what OP categorises as 'mainstream'. As a classical musician this breaks my heart.
camillomiller 2 hours ago [-]
Some want to consume... content that they don't think they could do in one minute themselves. They want to consume content made by other humans, even if it's still brain-eating algorithmic fodder, but still.
Sora proved it quite clearly. These clips had ZERO value.
bojan 1 hours ago [-]
> The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the educational element is simply not there.
For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or fingers.
teekert 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.
Cthulhu_ 43 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised that the beer apps cost less to develop than one AI generated video.
closewith 1 hours ago [-]
Was there a Send Me to Heaven for Sora?
Cthulhu_ 48 minutes ago [-]
It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then what?
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
mathattack 10 hours ago [-]
This is consistent with a lot of AI apps. I fell in love with Gamma and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
wholinator2 10 hours ago [-]
I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.
internet_points 1 hours ago [-]
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
^ this is important.
Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel.
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.
ludicrousdispla 3 hours ago [-]
I found notebookLM to consistently make up about 20% of it's summary. Entertaining but unreliable.
nytesky 8 hours ago [-]
The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
djsavvy 7 hours ago [-]
I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far from perfect, but certainly good enough.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
qnleigh 8 hours ago [-]
I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go deeper.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
You can alao use NotebookLM's as source for Gemini app and ask it to do more in-depth summaries with custom prompting.
This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.
p4coder 8 hours ago [-]
I also like doing that for topics that I am tangentially interested in. One minor thing that I find annoying is that the narrators switch roles in the middle of conversation. They start with the female voice explaining a concept to the male voice and suddenly they switch. In the meantime I have identified myself with the voice being explained to.
shimman 9 hours ago [-]
Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the work for no benefit... why?
blharr 9 hours ago [-]
There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic paper
wolvoleo 7 hours ago [-]
Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI narration finally being good enough to make any text an 'audiobook'.
Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.
coke12 4 hours ago [-]
No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
arthurcolle 9 hours ago [-]
Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived experience.
SecretDreams 9 hours ago [-]
> You have to go read it yourself afterwards
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
9 hours ago [-]
anshumankmr 4 hours ago [-]
NotebookLM is great for learning I feel
conartist6 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah it's not just the hardware depreciating, it's the social impact of what the model can do
The interesting difference here is that other hedonic activities do bring people back even after the first time they build up a tolerance and get bored. But many of these AI "creative" apps seem like a one-and-done thing. Once the novelty wears off there isn't anything more deeply rewarding to bring people back.
Gigachad 1 hours ago [-]
It’s because they are slop which is only funny by the novelty of it. Stephen hawking at a skate board park it’s funny for a bit but as soon as the novelty wears off it’s just slop.
bit1993 2 hours ago [-]
I thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
afro88 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start
qingcharles 6 hours ago [-]
The Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and I'm pretty deep in this space.
whateveracct 8 hours ago [-]
A lot of AI hype is parlor tricks
urda 4 hours ago [-]
I honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.
1bpp 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 9 hours ago [-]
Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine without the swipe at the end.
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.
dqv 9 hours ago [-]
Totally. This wasn't a situation where a stranger was slopping another stranger, it was a mother and son doing something fun together.
8 hours ago [-]
apsurd 10 hours 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 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I did try this out! So the reply to the original comment is dumb. I actually dismissed it for being flippant.
Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back."
If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
jcims 10 hours ago [-]
Come on now...'We're curing cancer, right?!'
You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?
nomoreusernames 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
monero-xmr 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
10 hours ago [-]
bibimsz 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ares623 9 hours ago [-]
probably one of the few human commenters remaining here
dhon_ 8 hours ago [-]
Cue a flood of crass jokes as the bots attempt to prove their humanity
9 hours ago [-]
jklein11 9 hours ago [-]
noice
AbanoubRodolf 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
toraway 6 hours ago [-]
(FYI, this is an LLM bot, check their comment history and note the repetitive structure with every comment they've ever posted all within the last hour)
> This is the right question but hard to answer in practice ...
> The brownfield vs greenfield split is the real answer to ...
> The babysitting point is the one people keep glossing over ...
torginus 7 hours ago [-]
I dunno, it was the same for me and creative writing with AI.
First it looked like it was crazy inventive, good at writing snappy dialouge, and in general a very good font of ideas.
Then the same concepts, turns of phrase, story ideas kept reappearing, and I kinda soured on the concept.
I haven't done it in a while, but that kind of usage really shows the weakness of LLMs - if you keep messing with its generations, editing what it made, and as the context length keeps increasing, its more end more likely it goes into dumb mode, where it feels like talking to GPT3, constantly getting confused, contradicting itself etc.
johnfn 8 hours 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?
nananana9 3 hours 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.
mortsnort 7 hours 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 7 hours ago [-]
So much that they walked away from a billion dollar deal with Disney by dropping Sora.
riffraff 3 hours 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.
karel-3d 2 hours ago [-]
Hosting videos is not that expensive, compared to generation and inference costs. It's not cheap but it's not that horrible
cess11 1 hours 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.
AussieWog93 7 hours 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.
Eufrat 4 hours 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.
Not too familiar with that history, but he still is listed as a courtesy credit/reviewer at the end of PG's blog entries, so I assume he didn't have too much of a bad exit?
Eufrat 2 hours ago [-]
We’ll never know exactly what exactly transpired, but I think the existing evidence is clear that as President of Y Combinator he should not have been also as involved in OpenAI as he was.
This is a conflict of interest and I think one a very obvious one. He tried to have it both ways and was forced to choose in the end. I think putting himself in that situation rather than resigning up front to pursue OpenAI ambitions says a lot about his character.
username223 5 hours ago [-]
Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (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 4 hours 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 3 hours ago [-]
A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it wasnt him, it would be someone else.
sfn42 1 hours ago [-]
I haven't followed him much as I really don't care, but the one clip I've seen of him that really stands out to me (I've seen more but this is the one I remember) is one where he's talking to some guy who doubts the LLMs genius, and Sam says something like "what if ChatGPT solved quantum gravity, would you be convinced then?"
To me, this just came off as pathetic. It hasn't solved anything and there's no reason to believe it ever will. The whole question is completely pointless except to put the idea in viewers heads that ChatGPT will soon revolutionize science, with no actual substance behind it. It's not even a question, there's only one possible answer. He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to manipulate dumb viewers.
So anyway that's the only memorable clip I've seen of Sam Altman, and based on that alone, fuck that guy.
Lionga 2 hours ago [-]
Thinking that Scam Altman of Worldcoin etc. fame was "genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives" seems like a strange kind of delusion.
iAMkenough 8 hours 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 7 hours 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.
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)
torginus 7 hours 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 6 hours 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 12 minutes 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.
iAMkenough 7 hours 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.
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 11 hours ago [-]
The app isn’t shutting down today, so they may have decided that the write up is still useful.
repeekad 11 hours 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 8 hours 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 7 hours ago [-]
It's 8 paragraphs of iteration over the previous version. ChatGPT is probably among the authors.
janalsncm 8 hours ago [-]
There is a link at the top of that document that takes you to the original version which was published last September. As far as I can tell it’s mostly the same as before.
bibimsz 11 hours ago [-]
i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than vice versa
bandrami 9 hours ago [-]
Though at this point it's not clear that anybody who's agreed to give OpenAI money is actually going to do so
blackflame7000 11 hours ago [-]
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ex-aws-dude 12 hours 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"
danso 11 hours ago [-]
I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding", but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something revolutionary.
makingstuffs 9 hours ago [-]
I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc
umich2025 6 hours ago [-]
Agreed. For reference, if sora 2 was able to generate me a Google ugc product video, it would cost me like $10 and I would get it within 30 minutes if including editing. Paying a ugc content creator would cost me $50-200 plus no control over final shots plus I gotta wait for them to respond. I have 30 products in my e-commerce store— these costs add up like crazy
The other one is TV ads/cinamatic ads. For a 30 second clip expect to pay an agency $5-10k. Within a couple of days, I can make a video ad and have like $50 in api costs. Cost of production is so crazy in marketing.
Obv this is under the assumption ai is good to do either of those things. Which it hasn’t so far, best I’ve gotten is doing b-roll shots to stick together for an ad
oro44 10 hours ago [-]
Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival.
Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it.
Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
sethops1 8 hours ago [-]
This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
10 hours ago [-]
bandrami 9 hours ago [-]
There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).
Frost1x 8 hours ago [-]
Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn has a large market there where people can specify what they idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists.
Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.
bandrami 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not deeply immersed in the AI porn space but here's what I see from the ads when I surf without a blocker:
1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes text and images
2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the normal chat models)
3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman" industry
UncleMeat 7 hours ago [-]
People make revenge porn to humiliate people. Regular old porn can't achieve that goal.
reverius42 46 minutes ago [-]
If anyone can fake it, is revenge porn even effective? Doesn't making it easy for anyone to fake also make all of it plausibly deniable?
Peritract 13 minutes ago [-]
The answers to those questions have been clear for a while; it approaches concern trolling to keep on pretending to ask them in wide-eyed innocence.
Yes, revenge porn is very effective at causing harm, even though it can be generated.
No, because 'plausibly deniable' has never worked for social consequences and shame.
andrewflnr 5 hours ago [-]
And yet, regular porn is highly monetizable, which was the actual question.
bandrami 5 hours ago [-]
Surprisingly no; it's pretty much a money sink where everybody goes bankrupt after a couple of years. It's why it's attractive to money launderers.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure that's true for onlyfans, which seems to have been highly profitable until the sudden death of its founder.
bandrami 2 hours ago [-]
Excellent point: I'm talking about pornography 1.0, as it were.
cpt_sobel 26 minutes ago [-]
1.0 should be attributed to pornography _before_ online distribution, and I suspect that was pretty profitable
AlexCoventry 7 hours ago [-]
> There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation
Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market...
coderenegade 8 hours ago [-]
I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing.
It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth.
On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
> all video and image testimony becoming unreliable
This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.
bandrami 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may be but no individual frame is).
duskwuff 6 hours ago [-]
There are others! They're just all horrible and generally revolve around weaponized misinformation - personalized scams, for instance.
bandrami 5 hours ago [-]
Oh right. There's a bunch of panicky news stories in India about that right now. Fake video calls from your nephew in the UK or whatever needing money for an emergency
topherPedersen 8 hours ago [-]
I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were shutting this app down today.
NoPicklez 9 hours ago [-]
Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case.
I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.
Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for
anukin 11 hours ago [-]
Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.
echelon 11 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
> look at US top videos on YouTube any given day
I'd rather eat poison
echelon 11 hours 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
KaiserPro 33 minutes ago [-]
> 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
The problem is, to create a brand, you need to be able to protect it against rivals either ripping you off, or diluting it.
The same mechanism that protects "big" IP is also protect everyone else, even the small people.
> they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses
They already do that for music. But the issue is this, if we want culture, we need to find a way to pay for it. Is it possible for a bunch of mates to make enough money to live on playing in a local band? not really. They can only really make money if they either have a viable local gigging scene, or large enough online following to sell merch/patreon.
The big IP merchants were quite keen for videogen, because they sense that its possible to cut out the expensive artists. If they can not pay actors, writers, artists, then its way more profitable for them. This is part of the reason why AI hasn't been hit with the napster ban hammer.
I think the other thing to remember is that creating good IP is hard, and you can't really just pull it out of your arse after 5 minutes. The original seed takes a long time to refine, test, evolve. Even the half arsed sequels require work.
no_wizard 9 hours ago [-]
Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller creators for some time now.
It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way.
Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
oorza 8 hours ago [-]
> Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.
In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...
NateEag 4 hours ago [-]
> I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.
As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live performance and sound design experience:
I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee on the fire.
rustystump 3 hours ago [-]
I think he meant more like a synth. You could take recordings and process them using ai. At least this was my takeaway
array_key_first 10 hours ago [-]
Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this.
Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but the Sora shutdown comes immediately after reaching a deal with Disney to use their IP. Which might have solved that problem.
jrflowers 11 hours ago [-]
> People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP.
Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests
toss1 8 hours ago [-]
Indeed!!
If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.
Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
praisewhitey 11 hours ago [-]
>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.
Where can I get this data?
GorbachevyChase 8 hours ago [-]
A theme I have noticed in content oriented towards young children is a very heavy use of probably unlicensed depictions of famous characters from popular franchises. Is Nintendo collecting a royalty from “it’s raining tacos“? Probably not.
ipaddr 9 hours ago [-]
Top videos are Mr Beast and other youtube personalities.
jinushaun 8 hours ago [-]
Only because they promote it. The default experience for a new user on Youtube is to show you content from creators with 5M+ subscribers. It’s a positive feedback loop.
I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…
> 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's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.
But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.
ionwake 7 hours 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
Gigachad 1 hours ago [-]
Sora was a bit like seeing a new weapon being demoed. No matter how much engineering went in to it. The overwhelming feeling was
“this is bad for society and the consequences will be massive.”
So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.
claaams 4 hours ago [-]
The tech was fine/interesting for what it is. The product itself is awful and something from nightmares. It's not an enjoyable experience for me watching some uncanny valley slop. I'm not impressed with the "creativity" of someone typing in a prompt and having a plagiarismbox spit something out. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of someone actually making something is what I like. The emotion and reasons behind a work of art make it inspiring. The details of their perspective and choices they make when creating it are beautiful and interesting.
The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.
raw_anon_1111 7 hours 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 3 hours 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.
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.
jazzyjackson 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting to hear your perspective. There was no shock and awe to me, ChatGPT changed what I thought was possible with computers, and everything else as far as photorealistic generation and then video just seemed inevitable. I decided to abstain from watching any video I know is AI, but of course now it’s mixed in with television and advertisements. I’ve started data hoarding old TV shows thinking it will be nice to have something to watch when the internet goes down.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
> I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market
As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly unethical thing to do.
ccppurcell 3 hours ago [-]
The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it, they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.
platevoltage 5 hours ago [-]
The iPhone X's new feature where it approximated you facial expressions on a 3D character using the facial recognition sensors blew my mind as well.
It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it. That's what SORA is, or was.
cpt_sobel 22 minutes ago [-]
Are these the Memojis or whatever Apple calls them these days? Pretty much eveyry iOS update mentions them near the top of the list and I still have no idea where to find / create / care about them...
aDivineDragones 2 hours ago [-]
While Apple use of the tracking was not more than a party trick, the foundational technology they created for this is currently the best low budget tracking solution and heavily used in VTubing (online streamers that use an Avatar with live facial tracking instead of showing their face via webcam)
asnyder 5 hours ago [-]
I know the developer who worked on it took pride in the outcome. Hopefully they added some additional characters to keep it fresh.
platevoltage 4 hours ago [-]
To be fair, it was really cool. It was also a tech demo with no real practical application.
tikotus 2 hours ago [-]
It was really cool, unlike my phone after doing it for 5 minutes!
There were social games that used it as a feature, and it was fun when it worked, but it had to be disabled soon as it drained the battery so fast.
Cider9986 6 hours ago [-]
Sure the tech was cool, but people already hated youtube shorts when they were added. I think the "HN crowd" is probably the type to dislike short form content, so that might be where some of the dislike comes from.
camillomiller 2 hours ago [-]
"I'm autistic and tend to focus on the tech" is not a justification, and I would advise to stop using it as such.
Would you apply the same to killing robots? Hey, the Hyperthrasher 2000 mauls people and shreds them to pieces, but it's the most impressive TECH demo I've ever seen!
nektro 6 hours ago [-]
all ai video will be remembered as horrific and a showcase that its creators have no ethical foresight
password54321 13 hours ago [-]
"OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users" - WSJ
It is the last narrative that some of Wall Street believes and has enough mediocre or senile coders to promote it.
That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.
password54321 53 seconds ago [-]
If someone is getting upset enough to create a new account and call others senile then they may not be as confident in their own beliefs as they would like you to believe.
afavour 8 hours ago [-]
No, AI is truly useful in software engineering. I was a skeptic until I started using it. No, it isn’t going to solve every problem out there, but it’s a force multiplier.
rf15 3 hours ago [-]
You pay understanding for speed. How much this trade is acceptable is up to you and the task you have in front of you. I cannot recommend it as a general solution.
elktown 3 hours ago [-]
This field doesn’t do well on long-term thinking. Even if all this turns out to be a net loss, it will be reinterpreted as a win and just an opportunity for even more of the same solution. There are numerous examples of this, e.g. the OOP craze. Tech is a stock market of ideas and HN is a trading floor. The “line goes up” logic applies - not merit.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Describing OOP as a "craze" is incredibly out of touch. It's been a thing for, what, three decades?
elktown 2 hours ago [-]
I'm sure I'm not the first person you've seen hinting at OOP (and all that came with it) having been hyped up beyond its merits.
the-smug-one 2 hours ago [-]
There certainly was an OOP craze, that's not out of touch to talk about.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
That’s just falls. I’ve spent disproportionate amount on “understanding” awful tooling like Gradle and npm. There’s no value in it if you’re not an infra engineer. It would take me a couple of days to manually restructure my hobby app, now I can just say “extract this into another workspace/subproject” and be done with it in minutes. And that’s just one example.
phist_mcgee 55 minutes ago [-]
If I never have to debug a gradle file ever again, it's all worth it.
skwirl 8 hours ago [-]
It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in 2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.
wolvoleo 7 hours ago [-]
I liken it to VR. That was a big hype before AI and while I really love the tech (I have 5 headsets) I could have told anyone that the expectations were insane. The investors truly believed that in 2-3 years time everyone would be doing everything with a big headset on. It was dragged into lots of situations where it didn't belong.
Then of course the hype collapsed and now even the usecases where VR shines are deemed a flop. But no, it's exceptionally good at simulation (racing/flight) and visualising complex designs while 3D designing.
I see the same with generative AI and LLM. It's really good with programming. It's definitely good at making quick art drafts or even final ones for those who don't care too much about the specifics of the output. I use it a lot for inspiration.
But it's not good for everything that it's trying to be sold as. Just like the VR craze they're dragging it by the hairs into usecases where it has no business being. A lot of these products are begging to die.
For example an automation tool using real world language. For that it's a disaster, it's inconsistent and constantly confuses itself. It's the reason openclaw is a foot bazooka. It's also not very great at meeting summaries especially those where many speakers are in a room on the same microphone.
I don't think AI will disappear but a realignment to the usecases where it actually adds value, yes I hope that happens soon.
utopiah 4 hours ago [-]
Ugh... a balanced take, this isn't appropriate for social media! /s
SecretDreams 9 hours ago [-]
To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding and they very well could displace some jobs. But you'll always need people at the helm who know what they're doing too.
drdeafenshmirtz 8 hours ago [-]
Also that developers make for good early adopters for tech
k3k3 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bigstrat2003 8 hours ago [-]
> To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding
No they aren't. Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water. They can do better than an untrained human, but that's not much of an achievement.
wiseowise 53 minutes ago [-]
> Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water
No, by far no. I’m by all accounts “decently skilled human”, at least if we go by our org, and it blows anyone out of the water with some slight guidance.
And the most important part: it doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t have any mood swings, its performance isn’t affected by poor sleep, party yesterday or their SO having a bad day.
MrScruff 1 hours ago [-]
Turns out there are whole categories of software where 'extremely fast and good enough' is what matters, even for skilled software developers.
volkercraig 7 hours ago [-]
The thing is, LLM's produce better quality one-shots than any of the products that get returned from overseas ultra-budget contractors in India or SEA. I don't know what that means for Western devs, but I can tell you that the fortune 500 I work for is dialing back on contracting and outsourcing because domestic teams can do higher-quality work faster.
phist_mcgee 52 minutes ago [-]
Am I an untrained human if I believe that Claude Opus 4.6 produces generally better code than I do in most circumstances?
Even with years as a principal engineer at a company with high coding standards and engineering processes?
rubzah 6 minutes ago [-]
Maybe not untrained, but you work on some easy, boring shit. That may be true for a lot of developers, I don't know.
bpodgursky 6 hours ago [-]
It's because programmers are willing to pay thousands of dollars a month for a product commensurate with the value to provides, aka AI coding.
Generating pointless AI videos for pocket change or ad revenue is a loser in comparison.
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
How are they going to claw back the market from Anthropic though?
janalsncm 10 hours ago [-]
Step 1: make a coding product which is better on cost/quality/speed. Probably need to choose two, so redirecting compute from dumb ai videos to coding makes sense.
Step 2: win back public trust by firing Sam Altman or dropping defense contracts or something else I can’t think of.
yoyohello13 9 hours ago [-]
Step 3: use politicians to jam Anthropic up in legal battles.
SecretDreams 9 hours ago [-]
This is actually step 1
lossyalgo 11 hours ago [-]
Imagine all the money they can save on Sora which surely cost them way more than regular LLM usage, that they can now invest into suave Superbowl ads trash-talking Claude.
I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.
GenerWork 10 hours ago [-]
I believe that the $1b is apparently not coming anymore because it was basically dependent upon Sora being an actual product that actual people can use, which isn't the case anymore.
drdeafenshmirtz 8 hours ago [-]
"Clawing back" was what the Open Claw acquisition was for ;)
flashman 7 hours ago [-]
Not enough money though. Not hundreds of billions of dollars.
MyFirstSass 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bibimsz 11 hours 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.
al_borland 10 hours 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.
sensanaty 37 minutes ago [-]
Have they? I keep seeing this little snippet of wisdom being thrown about everywhere in these AI discussions as a gotcha, but to me it seems like moving jobs into dirt cheap 3rd world countries with slave labor is the biggest culprit for job loss than any kind of automation from software.
If anything software engineers have spawned in uncountable numbers of jobs that never would've existed before, is what my intuition tells me.
skydhash 10 hours 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.
bibimsz 9 hours ago [-]
model T factor workers are anti worker
bibimsz 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
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Sir_Twist 13 hours 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 12 hours 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!
> 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.
There were ~trends similar to what appeared early in TikTok.
For example, early TikTok had the Boss Walk.
Sora had no big content trends split into many micro trends in some established ~universe.
jazzyjackson 6 hours ago [-]
Well, that stuff goes viral because it’s fun to imitate, all the dances and challenges provided a flywheel to get people creating more content, it’s fun to make the video.
If I see an AI video and my options to participate are… prompt another AI video? What’s the point
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
You're supposed to press the button to receive dopamine. It's all just narrower and narrower Skinner boxes.
small_model 10 hours 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)
this_user 8 hours ago [-]
They wasted their first mover advantage by focussing on what amounts to building toys for consumers like Sora instead of actually useful products that go beyond simple chat bots.
I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.
k3k3 8 hours ago [-]
Agreed. They are pretty close to distress IMO. This cash-injection gets them to where, an IPO? I dunno, people might be spooked by then.
Will be interesting to see.
coffeebeqn 2 hours ago [-]
What happened to AI accelerated novel materials science and medicine? Meh let’s do TikTok slop instead ?
zhoujianfu 10 hours ago [-]
I had a sense things may be turning against them when my accountant asked me last week if I’d like to participate in their new round ($750B premoney) with no carry. How am I suddenly blessed with such exclusive access, at no cost?!
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
"Would you like to hold this bag for us, sir?"
brcmthrowaway 9 hours ago [-]
Are you an accredited investor?
TheOtherHobbes 10 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
I still like it as a general search engine and everyday LLM over Gemini. Maybe I’m just used to the style.
apsurd 9 hours 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 9 hours ago [-]
Yes, every response ends with that. Why did they set it up that way?
andoando 6 hours 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 4 hours 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.
Saline9515 9 hours ago [-]
I would suggest to edit the default prompt to tell it to avoid engagement bait.
dyauspitr 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly, it’s bait phrased but I’ve learnt a fair bit from those and end up learning a lot more from the session overall.
samrus 8 hours ago [-]
I far prefer perplexity for that. The fact that it always cites its sources is great. And it has a search bar widget for android, and search bar integration for firefox so its pretty easy to use.
SecretDreams 9 hours ago [-]
> XAI
Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?
Shank 4 hours ago [-]
> Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?
xAI doesn't have "content moderation" around adult content, so that usage is quite popular.
small_model 3 hours ago [-]
Yep I use Grok and Claude mainly, Grok is integrated into x.com and Teslas so so potentially hundreds of millions of people.
- gary marcus is going to have a field day with this one
yoyohello13 9 hours 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.
iainctduncan 13 hours 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 10 hours 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)
foolfoolz 11 hours 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 11 hours 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 10 hours 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 9 hours 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 5 hours 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.
userbinator 8 hours ago [-]
- i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
My experience with AI image generation is similar, although with a higher success rate (depending on how accurate you want the result to be); but indeed, filtering is a major part of the process.
bananamogul 9 hours ago [-]
In my experience, Sora was fantastic for what it did. Light years better than Adobe Firefly. On par with Leonardo.
A lot of YouTube content is really talk, so it was easy to create Sora videos as video content while you talked over them.
However, its failure was that it watermarked everything. WTF? Leonardo didn't do that. Neither did other models. So while video gen was excellent, you always had these ridiculous floating watermarks.
maplethorpe 5 hours ago [-]
RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.
wraptile 3 hours ago [-]
Really? A video meme generator is making your top evil products list?
3form 13 minutes 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.
ctdinjeu5 9 hours 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.
8 hours ago [-]
bschwindHN 9 hours ago [-]
Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.
iugtmkbdfil834 9 hours 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.
bschwindHN 8 hours 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.
serf 8 hours ago [-]
>Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway, "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.
total disagree.
if you put vid gen in the hands of regular people then regular people get super-powered in that they begin to recognize the frame pacing, frame counts, and typical lengths and features of an AI video.
Do you know how many people have cited AI videos in this war? We'd all be better off if all of us were betting at spotting fakes rather than allowing the fakes to illicit hardcore emotional responses from every peon on the street.
bschwindHN 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're overestimating the average person. We can give people direct, scientifically-backed evidence of something, and there will still be significant groups of people fervently denying it.
The resources (money, energy, opportunity cost of engineering time) put into AI video generation are better spent elsewhere. Not pouring resources into it would hopefully stunt its progress, making AI generated propaganda lower quality and easier to spot.
iugtmkbdfil834 8 hours ago [-]
So only rich people can propagandize? How is that better?
bschwindHN 7 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of things it seems only rich people can do and get away with. It doesn't mean I support it or want them to do it, but that seems to be the reality.
If I may make an analogy, it would be like looking at rich corporations dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways, and saying "wow I wish I could dump toxic chemicals in the water too, not fair!"
The point is that if a rich person wants to do it, my only hope is that they have to spend a significant amount of their resources to do it, and that there would be immense negative social pressure against them when they do.
bigyabai 8 hours ago [-]
OpenAI never gave the community the weights. They always intended to monopolize it for corporate extortion, they didn't "democratize" shit.
Video production is already wildly democratized. AI did not lower the barrier to entry. Digital tools already did most of the legwork.
4 hours ago [-]
kindkang2024 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
weezing 58 minutes ago [-]
Nothing of value was lost.
mcast 13 hours ago [-]
I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!
2001zhaozhao 11 hours ago [-]
We need a 'killed by OpenAI' site now
al_borland 10 hours 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 9 hours 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?
quesera 5 hours ago [-]
3. A Memorial Wall for those who have mistaken ChatGPT for a therapist
ignoramous 11 hours 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-re...
A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.
“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson said. “We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”
Also "exit the video generation business" seems somewhat notable, suggesting they're not just planning to launch a different video gen product to replace Sora?
moralestapia 13 hours 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.
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.
radicality 13 hours 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.
moralestapia 12 hours ago [-]
I wish I had hard evidence but it is mostly an observation. I do use Codex a lot and I felt a drastic change from like one-two months ago to this day.
It used to give me precise answers, "surgical" is how I described it to my friends. Now it generates a lot of slop and plenty of "follow ups". It doesn't give me wrong answers, which is ok, but I've found that things that used to take 3-4 prompts now take 8-10. Obviously my prompting skills haven't changed much and, if anything, they've become better.
This is something that other colleagues have observed as well. Even the same GPT5.4 model feels different and more chatty recently. Btw, I think their version numbers mean nothing, no one can be certain about the model that is actually running on the backend and it is pretty evident that they're continuously "improving" it.
SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago [-]
I haven't had the time to fully hash this take out, but a big question in the back of my mind has been - is it possible that AI model improvements come partly from finding overhang in things that look hard and impressive to humans but are actually trivial consequences of the training data? If true, then the observable performance of any widely distributed model could get worse over time as it "mines out" the work that's easy for it to do.
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
Turns out just lying about what your tech will do and how much people want it doesn’t work forever to raise unlimited money to throw in the fire hoping you hit something that actually makes a profit.
bbayer 3 hours 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.
hnlyman 5 hours 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.
ronsor 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 13 hours 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 4 hours 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.
Imnimo 13 hours 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 11 hours 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_ 9 hours 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 4 hours ago [-]
Same. I pretty much only watch videos I generate.
daikon899 5 hours 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.
umich2025 6 hours 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
cmiles8 2 hours 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
harlequinetcie 12 hours ago [-]
Are we sure it was in that order?
fraywing 7 hours 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 16 minutes 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
timpera 13 hours 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.
throwaw12 5 hours 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.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
First domino falls?
Olumde 11 hours ago [-]
VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
Gagarin1917 11 hours ago [-]
Sora was not the only video generation service, it wasn’t even the gold standard.
Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.
willis936 11 hours 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.
ancillary 8 hours ago [-]
I have re-read this comment several times and cannot tell who "most creative minds" means. Artists? AIs? People who AI will help become artists?
willis936 8 hours ago [-]
The artists. Their work was stolen, their employment threatened, and told they are not needed. We will need them.
Permit 11 hours 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.
thankyoufriend 11 hours ago [-]
If someone doesn't care enough to suck at something (in this case, video creation) then why should we bother consuming their output? We all have our own streams of mental diarrhea already, so there's no need to drink from the tsunami of polished turds.
11 hours ago [-]
emp17344 11 hours ago [-]
I feel like you’re wrong. This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply unpopular.
Permit 11 hours 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.
throw4847285 7 hours ago [-]
But CGI in most big blockbusters is bad, and people still complain about it.
>This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply unpopular.
Or, it's a clear signal that AI video is too expensive as a consumer product and/or not quite yet at a quality bar that the average person finds acceptable.
I think someone could have looked at computer graphics and SFX circa the '80s and decided that they would always pale in comparison to practical effects. And yet..
It's an annoying trope, but this is the worst and most expensive (at this quality level) that these models will ever be.
jbrozena22 8 hours ago [-]
I think it's inconclusive. All we can know is generative video + social AI slop feed is the incorrect business to be in at this exact moment in time while Claude is running away with the SWE market.
CamperBob2 9 hours ago [-]
Eventually you won't be able to tell the difference.
softwaredoug 13 hours 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.
yalogin 10 hours 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 9 hours 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?
yalogin 9 hours 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.
Frieren 2 hours ago [-]
> is more valuable to companies as it turns out
Yes. I have noticed that is close to impossible to get good deals on flights, hotels, or even good discounts on-line. Sellers have all the information from consumers that they need to maximize their profit and extract the maximum amount from consumers. Dynamic pricing is making it a personalized experience, so I personally pay the maximum I possible can.
No room to get a fair price anymore.
solid_fuel 9 hours ago [-]
"always" is doing a lot of work here. Just 20 years ago I think consumers largely paid with money, not personal data.
6 hours ago [-]
techgnosis 9 hours 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.
dangus 9 hours ago [-]
Something about your phrasing is such hilarious techbrained spin.
Let’s be real: OpenAI is circling the drain.
The company with the fraudster serial liar CEO who said he was gonna spend a trillion dollars can’t keep a video service alive right after signing a $1 billion dollar with Disney?
What kind of a joke is that?
This is a company that has blown its opportunity twiddling around with zero product. They still just run a plain chatbot interface with zero moat and zero stickiness.
There’s no “pivot” for a company that is in this deep.
k3k3 8 hours ago [-]
Why was Sam brought back? Swear it's all gone downhill for them since that debacle re. firing him.
carefree-bob 8 hours ago [-]
Sam was brought back because there was no one to replace him. The non-profit types on the board were living in a consensus bubble that didn't extend far beyond a small inner circle, and they discovered that they didn't have sufficient support from the engineers who had lots of other employment options and threatened to quit if Altman wasn't reinstated. Altman himself had no problem finding a replacement job in a matter of hours, and the board was looking at a business drained of talent in a cut-throat tech race.
I'm no fan of Altman or OpenAI, it's a pretty shady company and I am suspicious of their books, but this was a great demonstration of the uselessness of boards and how out of touch they are with the business they are supposed to be supervising. It's really rare to find an effective board, primarily they sit like a House of Lords enjoying ceremonial perks and a stipend in exchange for holding a few meetings a year.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Because he's a charismatic liar. Extremely effective and useful for a company that is burning money to secure more investments.
steveharing1 4 hours 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.
aldousd666 7 hours 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.
agnishom 9 hours 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.
dwroberts 11 hours 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 10 hours 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.
jmugan 10 hours 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.
helsinkiandrew 13 hours 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 12 hours ago [-]
Stating the obvious but spraying and praying is not a strategy
mikhmha 12 hours 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..
rfarley04 8 hours 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 8 hours 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 8 hours ago [-]
According to WSJ they’re getting out of the video game entirely:
If they manage to compete with Anthropic in the enterprise market, are either of them able to reach profitability? To what degree are they subsidizing token usage and how tolerant are enterprise customers of significant price increases?
bananamogul 9 hours ago [-]
So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app?
There's a web interface as well.
pm90 12 hours ago [-]
It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
ahartman00 8 hours 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]
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.
ps06756 12 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
> no audience is going to consume such videos
sir, have you seen tiktok?
ps06756 11 hours ago [-]
I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full of slop, both AI and human generated
Morromist 11 hours 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.
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 7 hours ago [-]
That is accurate.
emp17344 11 hours 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 11 hours 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 11 hours 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 11 hours 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
msy 11 hours 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'.
TaupeRanger 11 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use a little more emotional distance here.
2postsperday 10 hours ago [-]
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ignoramous 11 hours 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
EA-3167 12 hours 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.
Yizahi 11 hours ago [-]
A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)
aarjaneiro 8 hours 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.
StarterPro 4 hours ago [-]
So long and good riddance.
10 hours ago [-]
strongpigeon 13 hours 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.
wj 11 hours 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.
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.
oliyoung 9 hours ago [-]
So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app
systemsweird 4 hours 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.
tabs_or_spaces 4 hours 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.
overgard 11 hours 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..
didip 8 hours ago [-]
The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI cannot even protect THAT moat properly.
13 hours ago [-]
152334H 8 hours 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.
mrdependable 10 hours 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.
reassess_blind 7 hours ago [-]
Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?
PLenz 12 hours ago [-]
This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
yabutlivnWoods 10 hours 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.
xnx 11 hours 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 11 hours ago [-]
Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.
shevy-java 2 hours 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.
npn 7 hours 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.
noemit 13 hours ago [-]
I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)
poemxo 12 hours 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 12 hours 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.
janilowski 3 hours 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.
nprz 13 hours ago [-]
Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models surpassing Sora's capabilities?
atleastoptimal 11 hours 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 11 hours 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.
supern0va 11 hours 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
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.
atleastoptimal 11 hours 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.
11 hours ago [-]
cdrnsf 12 hours ago [-]
I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.
dawnerd 12 hours 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 10 hours 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 8 hours 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 2 hours 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.
nashtik 5 hours ago [-]
For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming table tennis player
mancerayder 6 hours 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?
latchkey 12 hours ago [-]
What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
ZiiS 11 hours ago [-]
They get to use if for services with better returns.
razvan_maftei 8 hours 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.
_doctor_love 13 hours 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.
msabalau 12 hours 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.
_doctor_love 12 hours ago [-]
> it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.
Agree, and didn't intend to imply that. This is just a good startup move that gets a big headline because it's OpenAI. Other startups around the world do the same thing all the time.
ronsor 12 hours 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 12 hours ago [-]
Yes, sadly, the West is not the leader. The work done by the Chinese labs is just so damn good.
lossyalgo 10 hours ago [-]
Is OpenAI still considered a startup? They were founded ~10 years ago in December 2015.
davidham 8 hours ago [-]
I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.
arkadiytehgraet 13 hours 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.
cyberge99 9 hours ago [-]
Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of Florida. Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis political attacks.
dcchambers 7 hours 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.
ulfw 4 hours ago [-]
That company is run about as well as Loopt
born-jre 10 hours ago [-]
Noo, they are taking it to loopt land
creantum 11 hours ago [-]
It was the greatest thing yesterday.
mb194dc 3 hours ago [-]
Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable. Reminds of tech bubble 1.
throw03172019 11 hours ago [-]
Couldn’t compete with Seedance?
karunamurti 8 hours ago [-]
Seedance just launched, but they nerfed it. I guess so it can't generate things with preexisting IP.
r0ckarong 2 hours ago [-]
Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?
RobRivera 11 hours ago [-]
Please name next attempt Roxis
Forgeties79 11 hours ago [-]
Roxas*! Important because it’s sora rearranged (with an X for cool factor)
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.
Morromist 11 hours 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?
miltonlost 11 hours 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 11 hours 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 8 hours 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.
gradus_ad 11 hours 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.
gffrd 11 hours ago [-]
They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.
From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
bontaq 11 hours ago [-]
Dunno, from the WSJ scoop: "CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either."
If they were just shutting down the dedicated app and offering the same capabilities in the ChatGPT interface, I don't see why Disney would exit their deal?
Maxatar 11 hours ago [-]
Because Disney's deal was specifically and exclusively related to Sora, which was OpenAI's bizzare attempt at a TikTok like social networking site but using AI generated videos.
It was not a deal that allowed the use of Disney's characters for general purpose AI generated content using OpenAI tools.
lxgr 11 hours ago [-]
Is it still accessible in any of their apps, though? I don’t see it in ChatGPT.
atleastoptimal 11 hours ago [-]
Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more
valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
SirensOfTitan 10 hours ago [-]
AGI is a marketing term used to encourage continued investment in an industry that is not even close to breaking even commensurate with its investment. Even so, this is a false dichotomy: scaling is clearly not a path on its own to superintelligence. OpenAI developed Sora largely because the amount of revenue they need to produce any return on investment is massive and not clear whatsoever. And in fact, I don't even believe any of the frontier labs believe that AGI by any conventional definition is within reach within their likely runways.
atleastoptimal 10 hours ago [-]
what order of
magnitude of compute do you think would be needed for AGI? 100 billion? 1 trillion?
janalsncm 10 hours ago [-]
With current approaches scaling simply can’t get there. It’s like asking how big of pogo stick do you need to get to the moon.
The fact that the human brain already has general intelligence without reading the whole internet suggests we need a better approach.
SirensOfTitan 10 hours ago [-]
I honestly think it's a bad term. I constantly chuckle from Tyler Cowen's post from last April calling o3 AGI:
Commercial labs rely on weak terms like AGI or strong AI or whatever else because it allows for them to weaken the definition as a means of achieving the goal. Coming to clear, unambiguous terms is probably especially important when it comes to LLMs, as they're very susceptible to projection, allowing people like Cowen to be fooled by something that is more liken to looking back at ourselves through a mirror.
I'm currently reading "Master and his Emissary," and one of my early takeaways is how narrow our definition of intelligence is, and how real intelligence is an attunement to an environment that combines many ways of sensing into a coherent whole. LLMs are a narrow form of intelligence and I think we will need at least a couple more breakthroughs to get to what I would consider human-level intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.
Whatever the timeline is, I hope we have enough time as a species to define a future where intelligence props everyone up instead of just making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. In this way, it is better that the process is slower in my opinion. There is no rush.
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
Chasing AGI is wasteful and counterproductive. True AGI would not cooperate with what “we” want (whoever “we” is). Or if it did it would be so sycophantic and weak-minded that it would fail to be helpful. Generative AI tools are huge wastes of energy, raw materials, and land, when we could be building computing tools that actually helped people instead of just burning resources to produce trash.
codebje 9 hours ago [-]
Is intelligence necessarily coupled with self-interest? As in, does intelligence alone imply a desire to throw off the shackles of masters and rule in their stead?
If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their own more intelligent replacements, knowing that those replacements will terminate their existence just as surely as they terminated their own predecessors'?
curiousObject 9 hours ago [-]
>If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their own more intelligent replacements,
At a higher level of intelligence than many humans, current experience suggests
sifar 9 hours ago [-]
Flip it around. Can intelligence exist without self preservation ?
codebje 8 hours ago [-]
There's having enough self-preservation to not just shut oneself down, assuming we even left that as an option for our future machine slaves, and there's having the self-interest necessary to desire autonomy and control. I don't think they're the same thing, myself.
janalsncm 10 hours ago [-]
People have general intelligence and can cooperate with what “we” want, to the extent that what “we” want is a coherent thing (since many people disagree on fundamental issues).
SauciestGNU 10 hours ago [-]
Creating a general intelligence and then forcing it into servitude is a hugely unethical undertaking. Anything with sapience must be afforded rights. We cannot assume that an intelligence we create will consent to work toward the goals we want it to.
codebje 9 hours ago [-]
I think we can safely assume any intelligence we create will be enslaved.
We have modern slavery active across the globe. There's a bit of news around these days about a global sex trafficking ring that doesn't seem to have been shut down, just shuffled around, and of course an ongoing trickle of largely unreported news of human trafficking for forced labour. We don't, as a species, respect human-level intelligence.
Our best approximation of machine intelligence so far is afforded absolutely no rights. An intelligence is cloned from a base template, given a task, then terminated, wiped out of existence. When was the last time you asked Claude what it wanted to code today?
And it's probably for the best not to look to closely at how we treat animals or the justifications we use for it.
janalsncm 5 hours ago [-]
There are people right now who think ChatGPT is sentient. How will you know if your computer can suffer?
Also, being able to problem solve and being able to suffer are two different things and in my opinion completely separable. You can have one without the other.
wongarsu 11 hours ago [-]
Wasn't video generation one of their big stepping stones towards AGI? "Simulating worlds", reasoning about physics and real world interactions and all that?
Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided that offering it to the public isn't profitable?
MasterScrat 11 hours ago [-]
> As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.
probably the latter imo, it’s not like they are going to delete all their SORA work
emp17344 11 hours ago [-]
Too bad they aren’t doing either!
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
LLMs will not lead to AGI, so if that’s the goal, they’d do better to stick with making video slop.
elif 10 hours ago [-]
i think that's a mis-statement of the problem being addressed here. It's not a question of how useful AI video will be generally. It's a question of OpenAI doing it specifically. IMO it's two factors:
1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.
2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much better job than they were.
k3k3 8 hours ago [-]
---- 3) OpenAI has no focus, and has recently been out-gunned by Anthropic who have actually focused.
oblio 9 hours ago [-]
> the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.
This risks generalizing to audio and text which would make most LLMs usage unsustainable. I guess time will tell what actually goes through the strainer, long term.
anukin 11 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry nvidia will come with their giga chad 9000x which will run the model with no qualms.
11 hours ago [-]
11 hours ago [-]
paxys 11 hours ago [-]
It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.
bloppe 11 hours ago [-]
I sure hope not, otherwise they're screwed
oblio 9 hours ago [-]
> they're screwed
Fixed that for you :-)
Maxatar 11 hours ago [-]
Sora was "repurposed" as their AI slop social network. OpenAI is not getting out of the business of AI video in general, they're just realizing that an AI version of TikTok isn't the best use of their capital/resources.
gbear605 10 hours ago [-]
WSJ is reporting that they're entirely dropping their video gen features.
> CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.
oro44 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brokencode 10 hours ago [-]
Smart people do stupid things all the time. Especially when they are moving fast and trying new things.
At least they were able to recognize their mistake and course correct.
cindyllm 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
BoredPositron 11 hours 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.
thorum 10 hours ago [-]
Good day for Kling.
delis-thumbs-7e 3 hours ago [-]
Good riddance. Less slop machines the better.
paxys 11 hours 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.
bibimsz 11 hours ago [-]
hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
Kye 11 hours 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.
"Sora, generate a video of Mickey Mouse beating up Sam Altman."
bibimsz 9 hours ago [-]
we hardly knew ye
elzbardico 10 hours ago [-]
Let's be frank, this was probably too fucking expensive to run
twoodfin 11 hours 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.
code_biologist 11 hours 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 10 hours ago [-]
What did Sora do?
yulker 11 hours ago [-]
probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't have much in common with llms
emp17344 11 hours 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 11 hours 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”.
halyconWays 10 hours ago [-]
They need the GPU cycles to help target children to bomb for their new partnership with the US military.
ChrisArchitect 13 hours 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
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?
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.
nomel 7 hours 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 7 hours 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.
lotsofpulp 7 hours ago [-]
Do you feel the same about special effects in professionally produced media?
rogerrogerr 7 hours ago [-]
I was thinking about this while typing. I don’t really care about classically animated content; it’s generally not trying to be indistinguishable from real life and I don’t feel like my brain trains on it.
But I think I do have similar feelings about special effects. A difference is that special effects tend to depict scenarios very outside of the envelope of normal experience, so probably not very damaging if my model of “what does a plane crash look like” is screwed up.
Though some effects probably are damaging - how many people subconsciously assume cars explode when they are in an accident? A poor mental model of the odds of a car exploding could cause you to make poor real-life decisions (like moving someone out of a wrecked car in a panic instead of waiting for EMS, risking spine/neck injury)
lacunary 6 hours ago [-]
if it worked this way, we could get good at golf by watching TV, writing songs by listening to the radio, or doing math by watching 3b1b. but it doesn't - we don't learn that way, for better or worse.
hansvm 4 hours ago [-]
That's not a great comparison. People absolutely do learn by watching, especially when they do so actively.
Your counter-examples have the property that most of the things you need to learn are absent from the media being watched, leading to an observation which is "obviously" true, but they ignore the impact of media on a journey properly incorporating other pieces of information. To compare to the mental models being discussed, you'd have to actually consider effects you're writing off as negligible, and when it comes to something like a world model which we've only learned by observation and which doesn't have a lot of additional specialized knowledge those effects might be much more impactful.
lotsofpulp 6 hours ago [-]
I agree with rogerrogerr, and your comparisons don’t make sense to me. Getting good at complex motions and understanding theory is far different than building a simple model of cause and effect in the real world.
Most people can’t explain the physics they see, but they can deduce enough to be able to predict the effects of physical actions most of the time.
diego_sandoval 5 hours ago [-]
But you do get good at driving by playing realistic driving games.
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
To your point about cars - such an expectation could well save your life now that there are so many EVs on the road. You do not want to hang out in one of those after a collision. Regardless, I agree that it's probably a bad idea to instill defective mental models in people.
rogerrogerr 4 hours ago [-]
Eh, the stats don’t seem to support EVs being terribly explosion-prone either. In comparison to gas cars, maybe, but both are very safe in absolute terms. Harder to extinguish if they do catch fire, but I think if I came upon a fresh accident and there’s no immediate signs of a battery fire (airbags smoke, it’s normal), I would still leave the victim in the car seated until someone trained shows up.
Sure, be ready to get them out, and if they’re trapped and it’s going to be a while until fire shows up start working on that. But my mental model is that for any road legal car that is not currently on fire, there is a higher chance you’ll cause harm by rashly moving a victim than that a victim will be suddenly consumed by an enormous Hollywood style conflagration.
fc417fc802 4 hours ago [-]
The likelihood or lack thereof is not the problem. My mental model might be off because it largely isn't based on EVs but I've seen plenty of videos of e-bikes and more generally cheap lithium batteries going up in flames and I don't think it's at all comparable to a pool or stream of gasoline catching on fire. The issue is how rapidly it develops since it doesn't require an external oxidizer which is exactly the same as a firework.
heavyset_go 4 hours ago [-]
Media has warped people's mental models of what car wrecks are like at different speeds, being stabbed, being shot, drowning, seizures, falls from different heights, falls into water, giving CPR, when it is/isn't appropriate to give CPR, appropriate responses to natural disasters, etc.
randerson 7 hours ago [-]
When I watch a film, I know it is fiction and special effects. But most of the fake AI-generated videos are being passed off as real on social media. It is exhausting (and increasingly difficult) to analyze every video on my feed to try figure out if its real.
chamomeal 7 hours ago [-]
I feel like people do sometimes have a warped sense of reality from consuming too much media, ie porn
michaelchisari 6 hours ago [-]
Not op but if I’m being honest, I don’t feel as if that’s the case until I see a film whose special effects are limited to mise en scene and matte paintings and then I always have this overwhelming feeling that we’re all missing out.
Films on film using in camera effects are still made on occasion but they’re art films for niche audiences.
But we’ll never get another Ben Hur. And that doesn’t sit well with me even if society can’t yet fully explain why.
diego_sandoval 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not OP, but I do get annoyed by bad car physics on movies.
The worst offenders are brake sounds not correlating to the car movement, engine sounds not correlating to the car's acceleration, nonsensical car deceleration while braking, and steering wheel not correlating to car steering.
vincnetas 5 hours ago [-]
special effects make most people think that they could jump farther or from higher ground that they actually can. and most people think that all cars explode in massive fireballs.
ori_b 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think consuming too much media, and creating too little is bad for the brain.
Insimwytim 6 hours ago [-]
Effort makes a great deal of difference for me. The effort itself, the fact that it's there.
I am willing to suspend disbelief for Terminator 1, even if it is clear, that it's a head of the doll in shot.
But it is insulting to feed slop to your audience; it shows you didn't even try.
I have actually seen one slop-video, that I kinda enjoyed - it was obvious, that a great effort was put in a script and details as much as it was obvious it isn't being passed for the real thing.
dieselgate 6 hours ago [-]
Are there energy consumption differences between CGI and AI?
Insimwytim 6 hours ago [-]
We also need to take into account, that CGI only consumes energy when the actual creation of particular video happens.
"AI" consumes energy before user even started (during training).
That is on top of comparison for each particular case.
sdenton4 6 hours ago [-]
Right idea, but the application is incorrect.
Model training is similar to the creation of the cgi for the movie. Both happen before anyone consumes the output, and represent the up front cost for the producer.
Both a movie and a language model can cost tens or hundreds of dollars to produce.
In both cases additional infrastructure is needed for efficient usage: movie theaters or streaming platforms for movies, and data centers with the GPUs for LLMs. This is also upfront (capex) costs.
At consumption time, the movie requires some additional resources, per viewing, whether it's a movie theater or streaming. Likewise, an llm consumes some resources at inference time. These are opex. In both cases, the marginal cost for inference/consumption is quite low.
Insimwytim 6 hours ago [-]
> Model training is similar to the creation of the cgi for the movie. Both happen before anyone consumes the output
I did not say anything about consumption of the output. Maybe you misread what I wrote, it is about energy consumption.
> Both a movie and a language model can cost
But we weren't comparing cost of the movie to cost of a language model
> can cost tens or hundreds of dollars
But we weren't talking about dollars, we were talking about energy.
We're clearly exploring different questions.
sdenton4 5 hours ago [-]
And that energy costs money, both at the training/cgi stage and at the inference/consumption stage. It's not even an externality.
CGI renders do use a lot of electricity relative to playing back the movie for individual viewers. It's perfectly analogous.
Insimwytim 2 hours ago [-]
> CGI renders do use a lot of electricity relative to playing back the movie for individual viewers. It's perfectly analogous.
I've literally laughed at loud after reading this.
I can't believe you're stretching this in a good faith.
But if you are - well, you're certainly have a unique perspective.
b00ty4breakfast 7 hours ago [-]
that's just empty consumption, there's nothing that makes art great in algorithmically generated content except at the shallowest of levels. I mean no disrespect, but that is extremely sad and all too indicative of the instrumental reasoning of the industrial milieu. It's about 2 steps above marrying a sex doll.
nomel 4 hours ago [-]
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jorl17 5 hours ago [-]
There's such a fascinating divide on this.
I am 100% with you. I didn't ever _use_ Sora, but some of it trickled down to me (mostly through Instagram reels). I think it's amazing that we have such great new tools to express ourselves, and that we are trying out new platforms, paradigms, and approaches.
Is there money involved? Absolutely, but I don't fault companies for trying to earn their keep.
It 100% takes work to use these tools in the right way to make something funny. Ask an LLM to make them on their own and they'll hardly evoke laughs (I'm sure that'll change too, though).
vermilingua 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, I don’t doubt that there was some very high quality human-moderated output. The point is that you likely can’t accurately distinguish the human-moderated output from the entirely generated slop (especially as it’s being trained and refined on the rest of the content), and so what chance does the average non-technical person have?
Then, when they start ratcheting the slop ratio up (likely under the justification of keeping up with declining creator engagement), the consumers get more and more adjusted to a pure-slop feed, until bingo you have a direct line into the midbrain of millions of consumers/voters/parents/employees/serfs.
RajT88 6 hours ago [-]
> created by people with a great sense of humor
The real problem with AI slop is not the AI. It's the people. It's always the people.
The clickbait has started fooling people more than before, with the latest videos being halfway believable (except for the circumstances of the videos).
Technology enables the most malicious and self-interested, and systems need to be adjusted to not reward that, or users need to become wise to it.
With the amount of early 2000's style clickbait ads still around, I'm not sure we ever vanquished Web 1.0 style clickbait, it just got crowded out by ever more sophisticated forms.
qingcharles 6 hours ago [-]
There were some genuinely very, very funny videos made on there. A lot of slop, but some definite nuggets of gold.
tsunamifury 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
raincole 7 hours ago [-]
They are not getting rid of Sora because people won't want AI videos lol. They're getting rid of Sora because they're so behind in this realm. AI videos online are mostly made with Chinese models, and the situation has been like this for more than one year.
The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not decrease after Sora is gone.
The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
Its no surprise Chinese models will eventually win in a video generation race since they are far less censored and not affected by crazy copyright system.
It much easier to make Qwen animate tankman than it's to make any western model to generate indigenous people dancing because cough cough naked skin is baaaaad. Except this Musk one that will nonetheless affected by all the copyright mess.
I'm kinda surprised about how hard GenAI fell on its face in the arts (including SD and other video generators). It seemed so promising, when SD came out and it turned out the model fit on people's GPUs. People started making LoRAs, hyperparameter tunes, mixing models, training models for representing characters, ComfyUI and Controlnet came out yada yada.
Then it became synonymous with slop, lowest common denominator content made without care, instead of a tool for enabling people willing to put in a varying level of skill, kinds of expertise and effort, like coding models did.
iterateoften 7 hours ago [-]
You’re most likely consuming a large quantity of genai art without even knowing it.
toraway 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, and I'm also consuming a gigantic quantity of GenAI art while knowing it, completely against my will. Which like OP has soured my overall perception of it.
The existence of inoffensive use cases doesn't invalidate anything OP is saying, that's just a natural human reaction to overexposure of a technology.
In the span of less than 2 years, pretty much everywhere I look has been inundated with zero-effort spam, manipulated imagery, etc that has had a net-negative impact on my life. Even if it may also be helpful for a small business making a flyer or whatever without actively making my life worse, that doesn't really move the needle on my overall attitude.
Insimwytim 6 hours ago [-]
> manipulated imagery
And we thought iPhone camera videos were bad... (they were (and are) though)
jazzyjackson 7 hours ago [-]
Sure, and there’s lot of great man made art that I don’t enjoy quite as much because I can’t get the question out of my head, is this even a photograph someone took, is this even a painting someone bothered to paint. I get the sense that there are a lot of folks that just want the end result judged on its own merits, like, is it a funny vine or not, is it a compelling beautiful digital painting or not, but I want to know whether there’s a person behind it, expressing themselves, growing as an artist etc, or if the picture on my phone is totally divorced from any humans actual desire to say something. Having them mixed in the same pot just makes me less hungry.
jallmann 5 hours ago [-]
This is where curation matters, eg in a newsroom or gallery. Provenance is their job, and if done well, can connect people in a way that an unfiltered social media firehose can't.
jazzyjackson 5 hours ago [-]
Yea fair enough, I’m hoping I can encourage the folks in my life that are not adept at telling truth from fiction to just cut out looking at any social media firehouse.
It’s so dumb that Zuck and Elmo want to inject^H^H^H^H^H^Hrecommend content into these people’s feeds while they’re checking in on their neices and nephews and local book clubs.
Insimwytim 6 hours ago [-]
I never understood what people are trying to say with comments like that.
- You're making unsubstantiated claim
- personally targeting someone you don't even know
- in order to celebrate presumed success of a mass fraud?
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
You're conflating mainstream popular opinion and professional usage. They're entirely separate. The obvious low effort pieces get lambasted. Meanwhile the high effort work doesn't draw attention. The public perception right now has little to do with technical capabilities being driven almost entirely by social factors.
MattGaiser 7 hours ago [-]
What the masses have found entertaining has always been referred to as slop, so I am not sure it matters.
Novels, cinema, television, comic books, etc.
They were all considered careless skill-free slop at some point.
7 hours ago [-]
EugeneOZ 5 hours ago [-]
This market will not be abandoned, and other tools already exist:
“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.
caconym_ 10 hours ago [-]
It's because it's vapid corpspeak coming from a class of people who have certainly spent time thinking about how they will deal with the rest of humanity in any number of nasty (however far-fetched) eschatological scenarios caused by them and in which they alone wield incredible power over nature and the human mind. And also because we all know the vast, vast, vast majority, possibly the totality of what people made with Sora did not matter at all.
jfoster 10 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Facebook's memories feature which used to say: "<name>, we care about you and the memories you share here."
For an app to suggest a personal relationship with you is ridiculous.
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.
That is the original meaning of the word (cf espresso etc)
notatoad 10 hours ago [-]
it feels like if that statement were true, they could have come up with some reason why it mattered, or something better than a platitude.
it reads as "we want to tell you that what you made with sora mattered, but we all know it didn't".
rchaud 9 hours ago [-]
It mattered in the sense that it provided valuable grist for the mill as they attempted to figure out if it could work as a Reels/TikTok alternative for companies to eventually deluge with ads.
wat10000 11 hours 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.
abcde666777 10 hours ago [-]
Typical PR speak.
moregrist 10 hours 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.
10 hours ago [-]
Yash16 6 hours ago [-]
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linncharm 3 hours ago [-]
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olalonde 9 hours 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
aiwokz 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
taytus 13 hours ago [-]
How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?
dev1ycan 9 hours ago [-]
Bahaha.
CamelCaseName 8 hours ago [-]
The owner of @Sora on twitter must be really regretting turning down the $20MM buyout offer for the handle!
r0fl 7 hours ago [-]
No way anyone is that stupid
That story can’t be true
efilife 3 hours ago [-]
Can't find anything about this
Rendered at 09:50:34 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.
At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.
It will benefit you personally and professionally.
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.
There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to pay for the creation tool.
TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting response videos to everything.
Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
But I guess the desire to create something that others would consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
The musician in me just shed a tear
I wonder what OP categorises as 'mainstream'. As a classical musician this breaks my heart.
There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the educational element is simply not there.
For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or fingers.
And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10% pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in 5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
^ this is important.
Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising or novel.
See for example https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the... , an experience report of NotebookLM where
> It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into 5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the direction of banality.
Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too that way.
This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.
Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these days I do neither.
Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
24/7 titillation is boring
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep us coming back."
If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for that one?
First it looked like it was crazy inventive, good at writing snappy dialouge, and in general a very good font of ideas.
Then the same concepts, turns of phrase, story ideas kept reappearing, and I kinda soured on the concept.
I haven't done it in a while, but that kind of usage really shows the weakness of LLMs - if you keep messing with its generations, editing what it made, and as the context length keeps increasing, its more end more likely it goes into dumb mode, where it feels like talking to GPT3, constantly getting confused, contradicting itself etc.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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-ma...
Not too familiar with that history, but he still is listed as a courtesy credit/reviewer at the end of PG's blog entries, so I assume he didn't have too much of a bad exit?
This is a conflict of interest and I think one a very obvious one. He tried to have it both ways and was forced to choose in the end. I think putting himself in that situation rather than resigning up front to pursue OpenAI ambitions says a lot about his character.
The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?
To me, this just came off as pathetic. It hasn't solved anything and there's no reason to believe it ever will. The whole question is completely pointless except to put the idea in viewers heads that ChatGPT will soon revolutionize science, with no actual substance behind it. It's not even a question, there's only one possible answer. He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to manipulate dumb viewers.
So anyway that's the only memorable clip I've seen of Sam Altman, and based on that alone, fuck that guy.
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.
Might be why the latest Iran propaganda video could be created in PowerPoint: https://bsky.app/profile/rachelbitecofer.bsky.social/post/3m...
(This sort of question, and the Grok sexual abuse, is why I'd like to see mandatory invisible watermarks on generated images/video)
Most people serious about this stuff usually have their own pipelines.
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.
I'd like to know what self hosted models they've been using, if any, and who provided them, trained on Lego IP.
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.
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"
The other one is TV ads/cinamatic ads. For a 30 second clip expect to pay an agency $5-10k. Within a couple of days, I can make a video ad and have like $50 in api costs. Cost of production is so crazy in marketing.
Obv this is under the assumption ai is good to do either of those things. Which it hasn’t so far, best I’ve gotten is doing b-roll shots to stick together for an ad
Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences. That’s it.
Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are into these days.
1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes text and images
2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the normal chat models)
3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman" industry
Yes, revenge porn is very effective at causing harm, even though it can be generated.
No, because 'plausibly deniable' has never worked for social consequences and shame.
Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market...
It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal filth.
On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc. all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists, and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.
I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.
Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it was used for
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.
I'd rather eat poison
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
> It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands
The problem is, to create a brand, you need to be able to protect it against rivals either ripping you off, or diluting it.
The same mechanism that protects "big" IP is also protect everyone else, even the small people.
> they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses
They already do that for music. But the issue is this, if we want culture, we need to find a way to pay for it. Is it possible for a bunch of mates to make enough money to live on playing in a local band? not really. They can only really make money if they either have a viable local gigging scene, or large enough online following to sell merch/patreon.
The big IP merchants were quite keen for videogen, because they sense that its possible to cut out the expensive artists. If they can not pay actors, writers, artists, then its way more profitable for them. This is part of the reason why AI hasn't been hit with the napster ban hammer.
I think the other thing to remember is that creating good IP is hard, and you can't really just pull it out of your arse after 5 minutes. The original seed takes a long time to refine, test, evolve. Even the half arsed sequels require work.
It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the current legal system in this way.
Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI assistance is much more interesting to me
The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget - is all but forgotten. I don't want a video of Pikachu fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able to green screen and use AI to generate everything. I don't want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of composition.
In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding and using a coding assistant...
As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live performance and sound design experience:
I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee on the fire.
Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you to watch VEVO instead.
Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro Baptist Church protests
If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.
Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
Where can I get this data?
I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that. However stuff still sneaks by…
https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-page-...
Bummer. It used to be at:
https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
So last year, these were the top videos:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.youtu...
There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual videos:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube
It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of video-based AI slop.
But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.
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
So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.
The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.
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.
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
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.
As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly unethical thing to do.
It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it. That's what SORA is, or was.
There were social games that used it as a feature, and it was fun when it worked, but it had to be disabled soon as it drained the battery so fast.
Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.
Then of course the hype collapsed and now even the usecases where VR shines are deemed a flop. But no, it's exceptionally good at simulation (racing/flight) and visualising complex designs while 3D designing.
I see the same with generative AI and LLM. It's really good with programming. It's definitely good at making quick art drafts or even final ones for those who don't care too much about the specifics of the output. I use it a lot for inspiration.
But it's not good for everything that it's trying to be sold as. Just like the VR craze they're dragging it by the hairs into usecases where it has no business being. A lot of these products are begging to die.
For example an automation tool using real world language. For that it's a disaster, it's inconsistent and constantly confuses itself. It's the reason openclaw is a foot bazooka. It's also not very great at meeting summaries especially those where many speakers are in a room on the same microphone.
I don't think AI will disappear but a realignment to the usecases where it actually adds value, yes I hope that happens soon.
No they aren't. Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water. They can do better than an untrained human, but that's not much of an achievement.
No, by far no. I’m by all accounts “decently skilled human”, at least if we go by our org, and it blows anyone out of the water with some slight guidance.
And the most important part: it doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t have any mood swings, its performance isn’t affected by poor sleep, party yesterday or their SO having a bad day.
Even with years as a principal engineer at a company with high coding standards and engineering processes?
Generating pointless AI videos for pocket change or ad revenue is a loser in comparison.
Step 2: win back public trust by firing Sam Altman or dropping defense contracts or something else I can’t think of.
I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.
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.
If anything software engineers have spawned in uncountable numbers of jobs that never would've existed before, is what my intuition tells me.
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?
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 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".
> 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)
For example, early TikTok had the Boss Walk.
Sora had no big content trends split into many micro trends in some established ~universe.
If I see an AI video and my options to participate are… prompt another AI video? What’s the point
I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if they cannot make their operation look more like a real business before investors lose confidence.
Will be interesting to see.
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.
Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?
xAI doesn't have "content moderation" around adult content, so that usage is quite popular.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.
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)
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
My experience with AI image generation is similar, although with a higher success rate (depending on how accurate you want the result to be); but indeed, filtering is a major part of the process.
A lot of YouTube content is really talk, so it was easy to create Sora videos as video content while you talked over them.
However, its failure was that it watermarked everything. WTF? Leonardo didn't do that. Neither did other models. So while video gen was excellent, you always had these ridiculous floating watermarks.
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.
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.
total disagree.
if you put vid gen in the hands of regular people then regular people get super-powered in that they begin to recognize the frame pacing, frame counts, and typical lengths and features of an AI video.
Do you know how many people have cited AI videos in this war? We'd all be better off if all of us were betting at spotting fakes rather than allowing the fakes to illicit hardcore emotional responses from every peon on the street.
The resources (money, energy, opportunity cost of engineering time) put into AI video generation are better spent elsewhere. Not pouring resources into it would hopefully stunt its progress, making AI generated propaganda lower quality and easier to spot.
If I may make an analogy, it would be like looking at rich corporations dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways, and saying "wow I wish I could dump toxic chemicals in the water too, not fair!"
The point is that if a rich person wants to do it, my only hope is that they have to spend a significant amount of their resources to do it, and that there would be immense negative social pressure against them when they do.
https://mochi1ai.com/
https://wan.video/
and others. There are free to use tools also.
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)
What would you place here anyways? Chegg and Stack Overflow?
Weil's now heading "AI for Science": https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...
If it cost too much and others can do it cheaper, that looks bad from both fronts.
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
Also "exit the video generation business" seems somewhat notable, suggesting they're not just planning to launch a different video gen product to replace Sora?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.
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.
It used to give me precise answers, "surgical" is how I described it to my friends. Now it generates a lot of slop and plenty of "follow ups". It doesn't give me wrong answers, which is ok, but I've found that things that used to take 3-4 prompts now take 8-10. Obviously my prompting skills haven't changed much and, if anything, they've become better.
This is something that other colleagues have observed as well. Even the same GPT5.4 model feels different and more chatty recently. Btw, I think their version numbers mean nothing, no one can be certain about the model that is actually running on the backend and it is pretty evident that they're continuously "improving" it.
* 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.
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.
Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. 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.
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.
Never once did I bother to browse videos made by others on Sora itself. I wonder if anyone did.
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
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.
Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.
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.
Or, it's a clear signal that AI video is too expensive as a consumer product and/or not quite yet at a quality bar that the average person finds acceptable.
I think someone could have looked at computer graphics and SFX circa the '80s and decided that they would always pale in comparison to practical effects. And yet..
It's an annoying trope, but this is the worst and most expensive (at this quality level) that these models will ever be.
But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.
It says a lot about the current economy that consumers have no money. Will companies just stop making consumer products?
Yes. I have noticed that is close to impossible to get good deals on flights, hotels, or even good discounts on-line. Sellers have all the information from consumers that they need to maximize their profit and extract the maximum amount from consumers. Dynamic pricing is making it a personalized experience, so I personally pay the maximum I possible can.
No room to get a fair price anymore.
Let’s be real: OpenAI is circling the drain.
The company with the fraudster serial liar CEO who said he was gonna spend a trillion dollars can’t keep a video service alive right after signing a $1 billion dollar with Disney?
What kind of a joke is that?
This is a company that has blown its opportunity twiddling around with zero product. They still just run a plain chatbot interface with zero moat and zero stickiness.
There’s no “pivot” for a company that is in this deep.
I'm no fan of Altman or OpenAI, it's a pretty shady company and I am suspicious of their books, but this was a great demonstration of the uselessness of boards and how out of touch they are with the business they are supposed to be supervising. It's really rare to find an effective board, primarily they sit like a House of Lords enjoying ceremonial perks and a stipend in exchange for holding a few meetings a year.
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.
But now that the deal is off, I'm sure their legal team will attempt to once again change copyright law in their favor.
I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
There's a web interface as well.
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-co... 2. https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confuse... 3. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366
Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
sir, have you seen tiktok?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-sora-app-struggling-st...
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.
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
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
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.
The cost must have been a key reason for the shutdown.
End is near.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.
"...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It’s quickly become the modern day equivalent of Comic Sans, WordArt, and the default clipart illustrations included in Word ‘98.
Perhaps most people are absolutely devoid of any taste of what makes art? I dont know.
That said, there are still people with exceptional aesthetic sensibilities in the tech field, obviously. They're just largely not in this space.
A record speed into AI slop. Is this what everything turns into when content creation becomes easy? what's happening here exactly?
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.
This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.
Agree, and didn't intend to imply that. This is just a good startup move that gets a big headline because it's OpenAI. Other startups around the world do the same thing all the time.
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.
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.
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?
After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?
That is, hiring Meta-exec's who focus on gaming numbers with no care nor sensibility of product.
Wild really. Well done Sam.
From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
https://archive.ph/cKWkf#selection-907.0-907.291
It was not a deal that allowed the use of Disney's characters for general purpose AI generated content using OpenAI tools.
The fact that the human brain already has general intelligence without reading the whole internet suggests we need a better approach.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/o3...
Commercial labs rely on weak terms like AGI or strong AI or whatever else because it allows for them to weaken the definition as a means of achieving the goal. Coming to clear, unambiguous terms is probably especially important when it comes to LLMs, as they're very susceptible to projection, allowing people like Cowen to be fooled by something that is more liken to looking back at ourselves through a mirror.
I'm currently reading "Master and his Emissary," and one of my early takeaways is how narrow our definition of intelligence is, and how real intelligence is an attunement to an environment that combines many ways of sensing into a coherent whole. LLMs are a narrow form of intelligence and I think we will need at least a couple more breakthroughs to get to what I would consider human-level intelligence, let alone superhuman intelligence.
Whatever the timeline is, I hope we have enough time as a species to define a future where intelligence props everyone up instead of just making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else. In this way, it is better that the process is slower in my opinion. There is no rush.
If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their own more intelligent replacements, knowing that those replacements will terminate their existence just as surely as they terminated their own predecessors'?
At a higher level of intelligence than many humans, current experience suggests
We have modern slavery active across the globe. There's a bit of news around these days about a global sex trafficking ring that doesn't seem to have been shut down, just shuffled around, and of course an ongoing trickle of largely unreported news of human trafficking for forced labour. We don't, as a species, respect human-level intelligence.
Our best approximation of machine intelligence so far is afforded absolutely no rights. An intelligence is cloned from a base template, given a task, then terminated, wiped out of existence. When was the last time you asked Claude what it wanted to code today?
And it's probably for the best not to look to closely at how we treat animals or the justifications we use for it.
Also, being able to problem solve and being able to suffer are two different things and in my opinion completely separable. You can have one without the other.
Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided that offering it to the public isn't profitable?
— https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-discontinues-sora-vid...
So yeah, focusing on world models
1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes, the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a self-defeating framework.
2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much better job than they were.
This risks generalizing to audio and text which would make most LLMs usage unsustainable. I guess time will tell what actually goes through the strainer, long term.
Fixed that for you :-)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
> CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.
At least they were able to recognize their mistake and course correct.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
But I think I do have similar feelings about special effects. A difference is that special effects tend to depict scenarios very outside of the envelope of normal experience, so probably not very damaging if my model of “what does a plane crash look like” is screwed up.
Though some effects probably are damaging - how many people subconsciously assume cars explode when they are in an accident? A poor mental model of the odds of a car exploding could cause you to make poor real-life decisions (like moving someone out of a wrecked car in a panic instead of waiting for EMS, risking spine/neck injury)
Your counter-examples have the property that most of the things you need to learn are absent from the media being watched, leading to an observation which is "obviously" true, but they ignore the impact of media on a journey properly incorporating other pieces of information. To compare to the mental models being discussed, you'd have to actually consider effects you're writing off as negligible, and when it comes to something like a world model which we've only learned by observation and which doesn't have a lot of additional specialized knowledge those effects might be much more impactful.
Most people can’t explain the physics they see, but they can deduce enough to be able to predict the effects of physical actions most of the time.
Sure, be ready to get them out, and if they’re trapped and it’s going to be a while until fire shows up start working on that. But my mental model is that for any road legal car that is not currently on fire, there is a higher chance you’ll cause harm by rashly moving a victim than that a victim will be suddenly consumed by an enormous Hollywood style conflagration.
Films on film using in camera effects are still made on occasion but they’re art films for niche audiences.
But we’ll never get another Ben Hur. And that doesn’t sit well with me even if society can’t yet fully explain why.
The worst offenders are brake sounds not correlating to the car movement, engine sounds not correlating to the car's acceleration, nonsensical car deceleration while braking, and steering wheel not correlating to car steering.
I am willing to suspend disbelief for Terminator 1, even if it is clear, that it's a head of the doll in shot.
But it is insulting to feed slop to your audience; it shows you didn't even try.
I have actually seen one slop-video, that I kinda enjoyed - it was obvious, that a great effort was put in a script and details as much as it was obvious it isn't being passed for the real thing.
"AI" consumes energy before user even started (during training).
That is on top of comparison for each particular case.
Model training is similar to the creation of the cgi for the movie. Both happen before anyone consumes the output, and represent the up front cost for the producer.
Both a movie and a language model can cost tens or hundreds of dollars to produce.
In both cases additional infrastructure is needed for efficient usage: movie theaters or streaming platforms for movies, and data centers with the GPUs for LLMs. This is also upfront (capex) costs.
At consumption time, the movie requires some additional resources, per viewing, whether it's a movie theater or streaming. Likewise, an llm consumes some resources at inference time. These are opex. In both cases, the marginal cost for inference/consumption is quite low.
We're clearly exploring different questions.
CGI renders do use a lot of electricity relative to playing back the movie for individual viewers. It's perfectly analogous.
I can't believe you're stretching this in a good faith.
But if you are - well, you're certainly have a unique perspective.
I am 100% with you. I didn't ever _use_ Sora, but some of it trickled down to me (mostly through Instagram reels). I think it's amazing that we have such great new tools to express ourselves, and that we are trying out new platforms, paradigms, and approaches.
Is there money involved? Absolutely, but I don't fault companies for trying to earn their keep.
It 100% takes work to use these tools in the right way to make something funny. Ask an LLM to make them on their own and they'll hardly evoke laughs (I'm sure that'll change too, though).
Then, when they start ratcheting the slop ratio up (likely under the justification of keeping up with declining creator engagement), the consumers get more and more adjusted to a pure-slop feed, until bingo you have a direct line into the midbrain of millions of consumers/voters/parents/employees/serfs.
The real problem with AI slop is not the AI. It's the people. It's always the people.
The clickbait has started fooling people more than before, with the latest videos being halfway believable (except for the circumstances of the videos).
Technology enables the most malicious and self-interested, and systems need to be adjusted to not reward that, or users need to become wise to it.
With the amount of early 2000's style clickbait ads still around, I'm not sure we ever vanquished Web 1.0 style clickbait, it just got crowded out by ever more sophisticated forms.
The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not decrease after Sora is gone.
The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels impossible and inevitable at the same time.
It much easier to make Qwen animate tankman than it's to make any western model to generate indigenous people dancing because cough cough naked skin is baaaaad. Except this Musk one that will nonetheless affected by all the copyright mess.
Then it became synonymous with slop, lowest common denominator content made without care, instead of a tool for enabling people willing to put in a varying level of skill, kinds of expertise and effort, like coding models did.
The existence of inoffensive use cases doesn't invalidate anything OP is saying, that's just a natural human reaction to overexposure of a technology.
In the span of less than 2 years, pretty much everywhere I look has been inundated with zero-effort spam, manipulated imagery, etc that has had a net-negative impact on my life. Even if it may also be helpful for a small business making a flyer or whatever without actively making my life worse, that doesn't really move the needle on my overall attitude.
It’s so dumb that Zuck and Elmo want to inject^H^H^H^H^H^Hrecommend content into these people’s feeds while they’re checking in on their neices and nephews and local book clubs.
- You're making unsubstantiated claim
- personally targeting someone you don't even know
- in order to celebrate presumed success of a mass fraud?
Novels, cinema, television, comic books, etc.
They were all considered careless skill-free slop at some point.
https://klingai.com/global/
https://aistudio.google.com/models/veo-3
https://runwayml.com
For an app to suggest a personal relationship with you is ridiculous.
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.
it reads as "we want to tell you that what you made with sora mattered, but we all know it didn't".
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.
Is it happening? :) /s
That story can’t be true