Discussion
Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
pm90: It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...
latchkey: What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.
mrcwinn: Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed with very expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an IPO --- oh and not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram that are doing just fine.
ps06756: It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage to generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no audience is going to consume such videos.Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
ex-aws-dude: The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media meaning OAI could never get the ad revenue for that
wj: May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13 rated in the future?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.
miltonlost: Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was probably hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move would have not to make this horrible product that no one wanted in the first placeAfter placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for now removing my hand?
saalweachter: Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do it, and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove and preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-touching initiative?
gradus_ad: I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in the world is straight up shutting their service down because it's too expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a whole.
creantum: It was the greatest thing yesterday.
TaupeRanger: Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There absolutely is an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the tech will only get better from here.
echelon: > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.
foolfoolz: as a sora user:- 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
emp17344: So much for “replacing VFX artists”. It’s not necessarily a harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
zer00eyz: > but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal advice, or medical advice cause I lack the skill and understanding of these fields. Dunning Kruger still applies...There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a vision.
jimmytucson: Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to what I wanted but it never got all the way there.I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like what I have in mind.In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the first try.
tantalor: > look at US top videos on YouTube any given dayI'd rather eat poison
echelon: We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property, franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture.Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate IP.I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc. will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation - that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their characters and music.People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost the ability to generate IP. The interest faded immediately. The same thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
Olumde: VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
willis936: I feel like in several years we will look back at how we treated our most creative minds in disgust. This behavior will not be readily forgiven.
emp17344: You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use a little more emotional distance here.
Ancalagon: > no audience is going to consume such videossir, have you seen tiktok?
ps06756: I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full of slop, both AI and human generated
RobRivera: Please name next attempt Roxis
Forgeties79: Roxas*! Important because it’s sora rearranged (with an X for cool factor)
atleastoptimal: Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far more valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
emp17344: Too bad they aren’t doing either!
dwroberts: Disney's involvement with this was always strange. Their business lives and dies on the strength of their characters and their designs - why would you risk allowing a service to dilute them down and maybe misuse them?
ignoramous: > feels like the bubble is starting to popMay be. OpenAI shuttering Sora is line with them shifting focus towards b2b sales, instead of b2b2c or b2c.Interestingly, Aditya Ramesh, who iirc was the Sora 1 lead, is now "VP of Robotics" at OpenAI per his Twitter bio: https://x.com/model_mechanic
atleastoptimal: This will happen with most offerings made by the major AI labs. Inference is expensive, and the closer they get to AGI, the higher the opportunity to use compute for inference rather than training, especially if its for making what is essentially entertainment that many people hate on principle.
Morromist: Well, now they're no longer even close to being the leader in image & video gen. They aren't the leader in coding. They are losing market share in the chatbot domain too.So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer 2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?
gffrd: They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
twoodfin: If I were to get conspiracy-minded: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.
code_biologist: The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to operate, least monetizable model) seems like a simpler explanation. The legal costs/difficulty on top of "most expensive" are just the cherry on top.
chromacity: > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers of AI slop.But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT Shorts) have cornered the market of AI slop, and no one really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models in any other way. Which probably made them not worth subsidizing.
yulker: probably more cost than anything. image and video gen don't have much in common with llms
Permit: I feel like in several years we’ll have much more capable video generation than Sora was capable of and we won’t look back at all.
emp17344: I feel like you’re wrong. This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply unpopular.
Morromist: My girlfriend keeps sending me AI generated tiktoks, despite me complaining about them. To be fair, I've seen literally nothing on tiktok that isn't garbage, so the competition is pretty low. Your point "It looks cool for a while" might have some merit - I think I've seen less and less interest in these things over the last year which fits the news articles I've seen mentioning people got bored of using Sora pretty quickly.https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-sora-app-struggling-st...
wongarsu: Wasn't video generation one of their big stepping stones towards AGI? "Simulating worlds", reasoning about physics and real world interactions and all that?Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided that offering it to the public isn't profitable?
atleastoptimal: probably the latter imo, it’s not like they are going to delete all their SORA work
overgard: Amusingly, one of the ads on the page for me is a very obviously AI generated image of a man with sciatica. I say very obviously because his hands are on backwards..
lxgr: Is it still accessible in any of their apps, though? I don’t see it in ChatGPT.
ps06756: True, I did try to make some useful 1 minute videos, and found it really difficult to arrive at a finished productSure, I can write the screenplay and Veo will generate it for me. But I don't have experience in video creation/production , so it is difficult for me to write good prompts which generate engaging video
AlexAplin: Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/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.
bibimsz: i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than vice versa
davebranton: Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams, for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level" intelligence. Will the machine dream?What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you kill someone?AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that anyone actually wants.
atleastoptimal: agi just means a machine, system or whatever that can do anything as least as well as a human. The details dont matter as much as its ability to match humans in everything they are paid money to do.And obviously if such a system existed, the benefits (and risks) would be enormous, though the risks are smaller if you control it vs someone else, which is why every company is racing towards it.
bibimsz: hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
anukin: Don’t worry nvidia will come with their giga chad 9000x which will run the model with no qualms.
supern0va: >Will the machine dream?You seem to be mixing up intelligence and consciousness. Not only does intelligence exist outside of humans, and even mammals, but it exists outside of brains and even neurons. For example, slime molds have fascinating problem solving abilities: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811It is clear that whatever we are...creating/growing with LLMs, it is very unlike human intelligence, but it is nonetheless some type of intelligence.
bontaq: Dunno, from the original scoop: "CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either."https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...https://archive.ph/cKWkf#selection-907.0-907.291
MasterScrat: > As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.— https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-discontinues-sora-vid...So yeah, focusing on world models
throw03172019: Couldn’t compete with Seedance?
wongarsu: If they were just shutting down the dedicated app and offering the same capabilities in the ChatGPT interface, I don't see why Disney would exit their deal?
Maxatar: Because Disney's deal was specifically and exclusively related to Sora, which was OpenAI's bizzare attempt at a TikTok like social networking site but using AI generated videos.It was not a deal that allowed the use of Disney's characters for general purpose AI generated content using OpenAI tools.
paxys: It may very well be the future, but in the present OpenAI has to make money.
bloppe: I sure hope not, otherwise they're screwed
mrdependable: My guess is that we are going to see a new uber expensive video generation tool from them aimed at filmmakers in the next year.
tomhow: Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47508246.
