Discussion

OpenAI Killed Sora: The Real Numbers Behind the Shutdown (2026)

vinodpandey7: "Seeing some reports of the page refreshing — apologies, seems like the traffic is overwhelming my Blogger setup. Working on it."

prodigycorp: You forgot to remove the quotes from claude.

santiagobasulto: But doesn't $15M/day of inference cost imply "demand" from users? If this is the case, it's just a matter of time until costs can be reduced.

MrGilbert: > If this is the case, it's just a matter of time until costs can be reduced.Is it, though? We cannot predict technological advancement, and the times of Murphy's Law for computational power are long gone. There is simply no guarantee that the costs will go down enough.

kukkamario: I think there is plenty of room to make AI inference much more energy efficient. For example, there are companies testing creating custom silicon to run the model. Once that technology matures and we have some "good enough" models for normal use, inference cost for non-bleeding-edge models can come way down.I don't expect bleeding-edge models to become any cheaper, but previous generation models can potentially be really cheap.

PunchyHamster: The "matter of time" is getting more and more expensive, not cheaper, at least for next 2 years

brazzy: Not sure what you're referring to. If you're talking about inference cost for frontier models, that's going up because researchers keep pushing those frontiers, often without considering cost. And while they're subsidized (to gain market share), users have no reason NOT to use the crazy expensive frontier models.Once the market consolidates, and users get used to the idea of using models that are "good enough" because frontier models are too expensive, there's no reason AI cannot be profitable.

keiferski: I would be curious to know if there is actually as much business economic demand for AI video compared to images (logos, product graphics, etc.) or text (blogs, content everywhere, etc.)My impression is that video is too complex to easily fit into an AI pipeline. Either you need something highly specific, like your own product’s UI. Or you need something personable and consistent, like someone talking into his camera.

vinodpandey7: Exactly the gap Sora never bridged — impressive output, no clear workflow integration for businesses. Images slot into Canva, Figma, ads. Video had no equivalent home.

northernsausage: Story heavily edited by AI about an AI company with an AI product that makes AI videos that is closing so they can spend money on some other AI product. All seasoned with some AI goop images. I hate the future.

lionkor: vibe coded website too -- I waited 4 seconds for it to load

pjc50: The actual revenue was quoted at $2.1m .. total. Ever.It would require multiple order of magnitude cost reductions to make that worthwhile. Maybe another few decades of Moore's law, if we have that left.This was the Moviepass model of selling $10 bills for $9.

spiderfarmer: People are already using it to automate TikTok ad campaigns.

prodigycorp: I'm sorry to be this guy but this is an incredibly poor quality article. False structure (thesis/evidence), links to poor quality sources, and a non-examination of the core thesis, which is that it's burning too much money.$15m/day inference? How was that calculated? Forbes? Did they get it right? Is that a reasonable estimate? Still valid? How was revenue calculated?IMO most of the votes had to come from some vote ring (35 pts in 35 minutes for a crap article, no way.)

yifanl: Disneyworld has lines longer than the park can manage for decades, do you expect it to just be a matter of time until park management finally figures out how to queue people efficiently enough, or do you think the solution will be once again raising costs for the customer.

keiferski: You forgot the AI readers and AI commenters.

simonreiff: ...You're absolutely right!

yanhangyhy: strange seedance is not mentioned.

vinodpandey7: Good catch — Seedance deserves its own analysis, kept scope to Sora's direct competitive set here.

vinodpandey7: "Fair point — but Sora's downloads dropped 66% peak to Feb 2026 while costs stayed constant. Demand wasn't actually there to justify the infrastructure."

suck-my-spez: Website built with AI, infinite loads

vinni2: It could be over provisioned or that cost is supposed to be minimum cost with some minimum capacity which was never reached.

written-beyond: Yes but it was capped by their restriction on sign ups/registrations. That could've easily been in the hundreds of millions if the app had public signups.Idk if Instagram would exist if they were spending hundreds of millions a day.

brador: Those who want to generate AI videos are price sensitive and quality sensitive.Sora was neither.

imron: Make a loss on every sale but make it up in volume!

northernsausage: As a product photographer/videographer - No its not good enough to understand products so each scene its different, you can't storyboard or collaborate with it,. For high end products (where the money is), colour shape, scale matter and its just not consistent enough for professionals. For cheap tiktop slop products is fine because what arrives it never what you ordered anyway.The files are a pig to try and edit as well, making them beyond the generation and prompt costs expensive. At that point you might as well go and just film the ad.

hk__2: > But doesn't $15M/day of inference cost imply "demand" from users? If this is the case, it's just a matter of time until costs can be reduced.If you build a website that gives $100 for free to each one of your users, you’ll quickly have "demand" but that’s not "a matter of time until costs can be reduced".

Maken: I specially like the graph-looking picture with no axis, no data and no context.

hk__2: The context is the text below and under it. The axis doesn’t matter, it’s the shape that does.

lucianbr: Is that custom silicon for a specific model? I assumed custom silicon for running LLMs in general is what NVidia already sells.But if the AI companies can't charge per inference, I fear the economics will be even more difficult, not easier. Harder to recoup training costs, and if you make the silicon too expensive, nobody will buy it.

newsclues: I’ll eat lots of free samples at Costco of foods I’d never pay money for

bonesss: A box that says "Free T-Shirts" can create near-infinite demand.Paying near-infinity dollars for T-Shirts people want for $0 isn't a profitable business model.Demand side price sensitivity impacts potential supply side margins.

keiferski: Would you like me to give you five reasons why you forgot AI commenters and AI readers?

boredhedgehog: The aspiration is to replace the movie industry. That's a lot of demand.

zarzavat: There's not much profit in inference, it's heavily commoditized. There is an illusion of potential profitability because the closed-weight models are currently a step ahead of the open-weight models. However, if you ignore the closed-weight models, then the open-weight models are also getting better every year. In the limit, the open-weight models will end up just as good as the closed-weight models.AI is an inverse gold rush, the people who are getting rich off it are the people using it. The shovel-sellers are screwed.

rsynnott: Costs would have to be reduced about 2,000 times just to break even, assuming that inference was the only cost, which of course it was not.

danbruc: How many seconds of video did they generate per day for those $15,000,000, i.e. what would it actually cost me to generate, say, a three minute music video for my garage band? This should probably take into account how many attempts I would likely need to arrive at something I am satisfied with.

keiferski: But demand from whom? I feel like the biggest moneymakers in that industry are explicitly anti-AI.General business stuff like content or images has demand from across the economy. “Replace Hollywood” is kind of a niche thing.

goalieca: How many minutes would you generate to finally land on your 3 minute final copy?

sceptic123: but not if it's entirely made up