OpenAI’s video app “Sora” was launched last September. Soon users started sharing their generated slops and stealing everything from. dragon ball z to sponge bob. Currently closed, newly opened wall street journal The report reveals why. This resulted in fewer active users and cost the company a lot of money. It’s said to be $1 million a day, to be exact.
According to wall street journalthe platform peaked at 1 million daily users, but eventually dropped to less than 500,000. Still, producing videos of CEO Sam Altman baking Pikachu and other copyrighted IPs into Studio Ghibli wasn’t cheap. “According to people familiar with the matter, Sola was losing approximately $1 million per day,” the report said.
The AI-generated video-sharing platform was intended to help OpenAI gain customers and convince a public that was rapidly becoming hostile to LLMs that slop was fun and cool. Disney was so on board with this that it agreed to pay the company $1 billion for its services to help Mickey hitchhike to Altman’s AI Express.
Outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors in February that videos produced by Sora would be part of new short-form videos available on the streaming service Disney+. There were reportedly even plans to license a special version of the tool to the company so that Disney executives could create storyboards for their own live-action remakes.
So it’s even more interesting that Disney apparently didn’t know that OpenAI was going to kill its entire AI video business until just an hour before this move was announced. With Disney busy finding a new AI partner, Altman’s slop factory is instead betting on robotics for its final paycheck.
