It didn’t take long for OpenAI’s text-to-video AI app, Sora, to become part of an outrageous drama. Shortly after the company rolled out its flashy smartphone app in early October, it became the source of graphic videos of people shoplifting, grossly pirated footage of SpongeBob cooking meth, and mocking clips of deceased celebrities.
Less than five months later, OpenAI is aiming to remove the “unholy abomination” of Sora, a mind-boggling TikTok-like experience that few users actually used regularly. (After initially topping the App Store charts, downloads plummeted.)
as wall street journal According to reports, OpenAI is now considering discontinuing the app altogether, underscoring a nervous management team looking to refocus the company’s efforts on potential revenue streams such as enterprise and coding ahead of a rumored IPO.
CEO Sam Altman told staff in an announcement today that the company is scaling back all products related to video AI models. According to , even the developer version of Sora will be deprecated. WSJ.
Perhaps most surprisingly, integration within the company’s previously rumored ChatGPT chatbot has also faced difficulties, indicating that OpenAI has completely abandoned the idea.
The dramatic U-turn leaves many obvious questions unanswered. First, we don’t know what will come out of the multibillion-dollar deal OpenAI signed with Disney just three months ago in December. The three-year deal would include more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar characters and allow users to generate videos of them within Sora and ChatGPT.
We also don’t know the exact reason behind this move by OpenAI. Could it have something to do with the widespread piracy allegations that the company’s Sora app sparked last year? Or some other abominable content?
Perhaps a more likely explanation is that apps are incredibly expensive to run OpenAI and are not generating revenue.
“We can’t afford to miss this moment just because we’re distracted by side quests,” Fiji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, told employees in a memo, the paper quoted him as saying. WSJ last week. “We really need to increase productivity in general and on the business side in particular.”
Given that Sora has nothing to do with productivity in any meaningful sense, which is arguably the very antithesis, it’s no wonder OpenAI is trying to call it that.
Learn more about Sora: People are already making Disney videos of Sora that are horrifyingly scary
