Submitted 2 weeks 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.
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.
Best news I’ve heard all day! POP THE SLOP
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.
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
But muh slop
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.
Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way
Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with “AI”, allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).
So many people seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. This isn’t ending AI video creation, it just cost them a lot of money to offer it. You can generate a video on your own computer already. AI video isn’t going away because one company isn’t letting people do it on their servers for free any more.
Didn’t realise you could do it locally, just checked online and there’s several options. So why are these fuckers building huge, resource-greedy data centres. . ?
What you can do locally is slower and with much smaller models.
So they can charge you to do it on your phone…
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.
There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time.
Every once in a while, if you have the “notifications” on for a creator it’ll just randomly turn it off. I have a creator that I pay $1/mth subscription to, which you would think YouTube would take as a suggestion that I like that channel and show me when they upload something new. Nope! Instead the algorithm thinks I want to watch a fucking Neo Nazi musician.
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.
Finally, a good news
It’s so they can repurpose that capacity for developing robots. It’s not good at all.
Robots aren’t like software, it’s immediately obvious when they don’t work the way they’re advertised whereas chatbots can trick people into thinking they’re way more useful than they actually are.
Correct, thought there is still good news in a way: OpenAI is running out of money rapidly. So much so, that they have to pick and choose one thing over the other.
They would have done the robot thing anyways, but the fact that they had to shut something else down for it sbows that the massive deficit is starting to affect them pretty heavily.
The cracks are getting bigger and bigger.
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.
I think one of the reasons why consumer facing AI content is failing so bad is because we have had good video content for decades so it’s super obvious when a video is just off.
I think this relates to the main reason why AI is failing (or at least not popular with consumers). It automatically just means the product has less quality than you’ve been used to for your entire life. It hasn’t really provided anything new to consumers.
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?)
There are thousands of starving furry artists out there who would be happy to take your commission.
All roads lead to porn eventually when it comes to videos. youtube had to shut down alot of porn/bizarre videos targetting children a few years ago.
Could this mean less wholly AI generated videos on YouTube? Please be so.
People will just switch to using other tools like googles veo
Doesn’t that require a subscription though? It may not eliminate the slot videos, but that subscription is going to be a pretty substantial barrier to entry
Those pathetic AI youtube commercials where there is some fake over muscled geriatric talking about some miracle cure are the worst.
I just close them out. I’m hoping somewhere in youtubes algorithm of suck they are paying attention to how much those ads are hated.
ai video is not going away
Openai is the canary
Bye Felicia
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.
They’re focusing on short-term
profitabilityhemorrhaging slightly less money, as other commenters mentioned.
Quick nitpicky fix. The only way they don’t lose shit tons of money is if they shut down completely.
It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn’t be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.
But now that’s Google and Grok’s problems, I guess.
If the audio and video is AI-generated I’m going to assume that the script is, too.
I’ve had to do training at work that I’m fairly certain was mostly AI generated. The pics and audio seemed to be. And even the questions that I had to get right in order to complete the training… Some of them just weren’t covered in the training. Come on
Oh no, it was very specific and hard to cram all the words in to the time. Typical Sora is that it’s either screaming or long pauses.
those 15seconds used alot of power, like megawatts.
Sweet now do the whole company
I absolutely can’t wait for more of this shit to start collapsing financially.
Maybe time to move retirement accounts into cash.
Cash will lose value just exactly as the money in your account.
Move it to precious metals or assets that historically average flatter value through crashes. The dollar is highly volatile in economic crisis.
I’d do this but its probably the wrong move. I tend to go with the steam method: do nothing while everyone else scrambles, profit.
Or invest in non-US to keep them safe. Like Norwegian funds while the orange is oranging to gain on the oil price boom, and then spread out to European and emerging markets when he has his first public stroke in a few months.
I’d be shocked if any other country let’s Americans use their banks and markets but I mean I guess its possible I know there’s forex and stuff like that.
I’ve always heard no one wants Americans to open bank accounts if they aren’t living there
Meh, I’m poor and have no assets at all. Guess I just die.
Good
Good.
NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.
CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
kromem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s not and probably the opposite.
When Sora launched it was way ahead. Seedance 2’s release was notably better than any of the other video gen models, Sora included.
The market is getting commoditized because there’s no moat and OpenAI hasn’t led on pretty much any release for a while now other than Sora, which they’re probably falling behind on now.
This is the opposite of a burst from a tech standpoint, even if OpenAI as a company starts to pop.
TL;DR: This is likely happening because the tech accelerated across the industry in ways OpenAI can’t catch back up to, not because it’s lagging.
NekoKoneko@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Upvoted for a different perspective, but I suspect it ends in the same place.
OpenAI is kept solvent by investor capital, and capital is kept flowing by the perception of OpenAI being the market leader. Seedance being a better model, enough to cause OpenAI to exit the market, still ruptures the perception of value. In a market with no clear profitability path, that’s ground falling away.
It also can’t be simply commoditized because generations (I’m sure even Seedance) are expensive and still not good enough for production use, even if 50% of their consumer base might boycott if a major studio even did use it in production. Commoditization can’t occur when there’s still no economically self-sustaining, market-acceptable “good enough” product. Without that, even if the leader changes, it’s a race between lemmings (sorry) off the cliff.
ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Isn’t spending billions of dollars with nothing to show for it in the end the definition of a popping bubble?
makyo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yep - they briefly led in video gen but quickly were overtaken by other groups. There are even open source local models that perform really well now.
They could conceivably catch back up but how does that help them when their priority is chasing the AGI/ASI dragon?
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The end of the AI bubble has been beginning for years. The end of the beginning of the end of the bubble might take a few more years.
IronBird@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
escalator up, elevator down
klay1@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i agree that AI is a bubble of trash but shutting off a part that wasn’t worth the cost is not an indication of an end. They just reduced cost to extend the financial runway. From my point of view text and coding were more popular anyway.