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.

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.

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?

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"

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

Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072

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?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...

- 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

They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.

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.

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

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

* 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.

Then they killed Dall-E 2 and my credits vaporized.

Anybody found themselves in the same situation? What have you done?

also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…

But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.

Maybe it achieved its objective?

Disinfo AI videos and the Coca Cola Christmas ad have also really soured my expectation of genuinely positive creative uses of video gen for the next couple years until more improvements are made, and I start seeing stuff go viral for being good instead of just being weird. I am still surprised that sora never had the grok problem of generating csam or seemingly anything along those lines.

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.

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.

I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..

There's a web interface as well.

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.

Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.

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.

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.

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.

A record speed into AI slop. Is this what everything turns into when content creation becomes easy? what's happening here exactly?

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.

"...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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE

I had a lot of fun using Sora and got a lot of laughs with absurd videos of me in various situations.

But like everyone else, I kind of got it out of my system after a couple weeks. Not to mention that my family got sick of seeing them. And so my usage collapsed to zero. And that seems to have also been the pattern writ large.

But this kind of flash-in-the-pan dynamic is devastating for a product with this kind of profile, which requires insane amounts of compute hardware to serve while also having no short-term monetization path.

Meta could afford to invest in IG Reels even when it was burning money and costing them a fortune for hardware because it was building up what turned out to be sustainable usage patterns which persisted long after the initial spending ramp.

It’s basically impossible to effectively monetize anything that’s not sustainable on the order of multiple years.

A subscription-based model would see excessively high churn that would be ruinous to the economics, and also advertisers wouldn’t be interested either, for the obvious reasons.

So why couldn’t this work? I don’t think that it was because the models weren’t good enough or that the depictions weren’t realistic or lifelike enough. I still marvel at some of the better outputs I was able to get from Sora.

I think the fundamental problem that Sora faced is actually much broader and more general, and it comes down to the basic Pareto math of any content generation or creative app, which is that 95%+ of the users just want to passively consume content from the 5% or less that actually wants to generate it (and is capable of making anything that other people want to watch).

It was really dismal to see the repetitive, trite ideas that 99% of users generated in the public feed. Just the same few dumb jokes and things they copied from other users.

Or putting themselves in a scene with their favorite fictional or cartoon characters or whatever, which of course got banned pretty quickly for copyright issues.

Most people are not creative and don’t have a lot of original, interesting ideas. So that means that the vast majority of the content is always going to come from a vanishingly small number of creators in a power law distribution.

And those super-creators aren’t going to want to be limited to a simple text-based interface that can only generate for 10 seconds at a time with no continuity and where large portions of things you might want to try are strictly forbidden.

They’ll instead gravitate to more customized solutions for power users that regular users would find as overwhelming to use as AutoCAD.

And that’s what you’re seeing now with all the new viral AI slop videos that are made by a handful of creators who have figured out the workflows and are pumping out the worst junk you can imagine that gets people to click and watch.

Anyway, RIP Sora; it was fun while it lasted. Thanks, Sam, for blowing a few hundred million bucks so we could get some laughs.

> 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)

Is it happening? :) /s

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.