Submitted 12 hours ago by FallenWalnut@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/openai-shutting-down-sora-video-disney-1236698277/
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/44699253
This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.
Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.
you mean giving away billions of dollars of computer with no monetisation strategy was bad? man who would have thought. not sam, apparently. if only there were like, some way to have realised that the goal of business is to earn money
Best news I’ve heard all day! POP THE SLOP
As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I’ve gotten this year.
Congrats! 🥳🥳🥳
Why stop there? Just shut the whole company down.
Best I can do is shutting the whole planet down.
Bet
Oh it’s part of the military machine now. It’s never going away now. OpenAI won the war, Anthropic fumbled the ball by not openly capitulating to the fascist state. The competition just hasn’t realized it yet.
Oooooohhhh is it starting? I hope it’s starting 🤩
POP! POP ALREADY!!! PLEASE!!!
Just a long deflation coming.
In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.
We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.
Everybody else gets dropped on the floor.
Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won’t be coming back.
GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let’s hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.
But muh slop
All people ever did with sora was make doorbell cam footage of dogs watergunning old ladies and gorillas getting sucked into tornados. AI image and video generation is just a tool to make a funny joke, it’s incapable of doing anything serious in its current state, and with the amount of processing power it needs just to be a digital circus clown it’s unlikely to become anything more.
AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.
AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there’s just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.
That’s aside from the fact that sora could’ve been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.
… but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation …
There’s a ton of that going around with sora, but for all I know it could be a smalll group of people. According to their pricing page, 140 bucks a month normally (50% off right now lol) will get you almost 5000 videos a year. Seems plenty to spread a bunch of shit.
There’s also 100 YouTube channels of “real life Pokémon”. What will we ever do without those???
So youtube will be worth watching again right?
Right?
It still is for the creators there. Instead of browsing the algorithm I start on the subscriptions page, to only see uploads from people I actually want to.
There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time. People just never got recommended the videos despite hitting all the buttons.
For example, did you know both Physics Girl and Tom Scott have returned this month - hopefully a sign that the world can still heal.
Ublock origin - beyond the addblocking, I use the picker tool to filter all the extra sections like “news”, “trending” “you might like” etc. Unhook - toggles to disable a bunch of features like comments, home screen, end screen etc. Enhancer for Youtube - Themeing and a bunch of extra settings like setting defaults for each video. speed, volume, resolution, fill screen (which is different than full screen), PIP while you scroll comments. (The author just did a rework, so it can be a little bugged sometimes - reinstalling it fixed it for me last time it went wonky.
Wait, hold on. Enhancer for Youtube is back on Firefox? Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC the dev didn’t update the extension for firefox for a long time due to some policies mozilla have with extensions, and IIRC it has been stuck at 2.5 something whereas the chromium version gotten the 3.0.
I’ve had to make do with another youtube extension since it keep bugging out.
this is great news!
Since Tom Scott is coming back soon, that’s a clear yes.
ai video is not going away
I’d bet money that the Disney deal falling through was because OpenAI couldn’t guarantee that Sora couldn’t be used to generate porn of their characters, since attackers will almost certainly always find new prompt injections.
Surprise surprise, it’s a giant fucking black box that you can never have complete control over.
But my Ariel on Vaporean is a dream yet to become a reality… (I’m getting old, that is the Pokemon with the weird fetish, right?)
I think it was build on the original transformer architecture and as such took a shitload of compute and was slooow, so I guess they picked the wrong architecture and had to scrub the whole strategy. Huge loss… That also point to US not having enough cheap compute (compute->combined mem and processing) - likely from missing electricity. Lovely… Die Saltman, die, and Go go China !
Go go China !
Bops the tankie.
Like, I have a Chinese LLM loaded right this second and follow them closely, but holy moly. Curb your enthusiasm.
Anyway, OpenAI has plenty of compute to train a Sora 2 if they want, but apparently they don’t. My guess is some combination of:
They couldn’t figure out a more efficient architecture, like you speculated. I buy that. Tech bro development is way more conservative than you’d think, and video generation is inherently intense, especially if Sora 1 is the baseline.
…Maybe they looked at metrics, saw Sora is mostly used for spam and scams, and pulled the plug for liability reasons?
They’re focusing on short-term profitability, as other commenters mentioned.
Sora 2 was massive lost leader for OpenAI, and a massive basis for its compute demand. Images and video use expensive compute time, and its ambition level was high before Seadance 2, and small open models. With its falling behind in coding/office LLMs as well, only Skynet/Government can pay for its roadmap.
Good
I hate to hear this! I really enjoyed Sora. My friends and I made so many memes of each other on there. It was great for illustrating inside jokes.
But are you willing to pay $5 to $10 a roll when you’re making a video joke?
See, @CodeBlooded@programming.dev 's goofing off with free version is what destroyed the AI bubble. Of course, he wasn’t going to convert to paid service.
Not sora its gone
NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
That is the strongest indication this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble. Sora burned a ton of processing power, with no clear value proposition, just to keep the hype cycle going a little longer. Shutting down without explanation leaves the most likely one: they are out of helium to pump into the balloon. And if that balloon isn’t inflating, it’s deflating.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
It was a weak attempt to keep relevance when faced against Gemini and Claude. But it’s completely unnecessary now that OpenAI has contracted with the government. They get all that sweet tax payer money and get to repurpose a ton of GPUs making stupid videos to supporting that new gov contract.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.