Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried and a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and it's only natural for a lot of companies to overreach, but essentially reality and gravity are pulling them back. And as some other people have mentioned wall Street and others see that coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money and have a really profitable business and there are auxiliary functions. Driving addictive content is not really one that should be at the forefront and while many will continue to do that and we'll have all this generative content, I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.

Over time we're probably going to see some really broad and strong use cases of AI, but I think in the case of social media or generative content, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about it. And I'm glad that they're shutting down this app as much as it's great to see innovation and technology and to see how far it's pushed. I prefer to see it when someone like Google does it? Because they're really doing it from the standpoint of this has broad applicable applications to something like simulation or training. Not whatever open AI was doing which honestly just doesn't feel very truthful. I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else. And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.

I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.

After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.

As someone who generally liked the products that OpenAI puts out, I think Sora was their first product that I really didn't like. I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as fast as possible. And I felt like OpenAI's other products, like Deep Research, agent mode, etc, were the same way. Even Atlas, although I suspect it will be equally ill-fated, attempts to follow this same pattern. It really felt like OpenAI was separating themselves from the common popular apps like Tiktok, Reddit, Instagram, etc, which seemed to exist entirely to distract me from things I care about and waste my time.

Sora was the first product OpenAI shipped where I felt that fell into that second category, and for that I was very disappointed. You have all those GPUs, and the most incredible technology in the world, and the most brilliant engineers, and all you can think to do with them is to make an app that just makes meme videos? I mean, c'mon!

Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there? Even if Sora wasn't a spectacular success, it seems to me like subsequent model improvements could have moved the needle - shutting it down so soon seems premature. I mean, what if this is the equivalent of making ChatGPT with GPT 3?

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.

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 in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that

Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"

Man I find the HN crowd so cross and fickle sometimes. I think it’s just because when companies get bad rep it affects how people view the products? Im autistic and tend to focus on the tech

SORA ( whatever that means) was one of the most astounding demos I’ve probably ever seen ( ChatGPT was more gradual ).

The shock and awe of rendered AI video blew my mind.

Yes months later everyone can do it and is bored by it and has strong opinions about what is right for society or not.

But it was a monumental piece of tech and I personally ( clearly incorrectly ) think the top comments should be appreciative of the release and the impact

Personally I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market But I don’t know enough tbh

"OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users" - WSJ

Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072

> OpenAI launched Sora last September, aiming to expand its dominance among consumers by creating a TikTok-style social feed that allowed users to share AI-generated content with one another.

I never understood what this app was about. TikTok (and I would argue most modern social media platforms) isn’t really about sharing things with friends, it’s about entertainment. Most people watch TikToks and YouTube videos because they are entertaining. Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?

Not good, seems like they are running out of cash and partners abandoning them. They had no real moat to be fair. Anthropic eating their lunch in enterprise and other players have cashflows from other businesses (XAI, Google)

And this kills the Disney deal:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...

It’s been interesting seeing OpenAI pivot. Snapping up popular open source devs, sicking their bought and paid for politicians on their competitors.

They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.

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

RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.

You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...

To focus on code generation - arguably the easiest problem to solve.

So strange that they fell behind after leading the charge on video from Will Smith spaghetti through the spectacular launch of Sora.

Turns out anyone can get that look by appending “like an Octane render”

Beyond that, like Kling and Hailou quickly surpassed them on product, and OpenAI never even attempted text-to-3d as if they are entirely uninterested in rich media.

OpenAI reminds me more of Meta than any other company. They’re both pioneering in their space and yet are mere commandeers (not innovators) when it comes to technology and importantly end user products.

They’ll also be extremely valuable, like Meta due to their ad product and ever-growing user base over the next 10 years, and I guess by focusing on code they plan to capture a segment of the developer market à la React or Swift.

Will OpenAI release a language or framework? An IDE? I bet the chat paradigm stays for the ad product and aging user base (lol) while the exciting innovation will happen in code automation and product development - an area they are not really experts in.

Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.

I’m just wondering whether the real reason behind this is the cost of supporting the model and service, or competition from players like Seedance.

I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!

Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?

https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

This was inevitable since Antropic made a fortune by releasing single app with only text generation business. They did best code generator and targeted developers and enterprise users. OpenAI did only 1.5 million dollars from Sora which is obviously far from profitable. So it is logical to assign GPU time to more profitable business.

I used Sora for a very brief time in late 2025. As ridiculous as the videos usually were, I always thought there was more evidence of human creativity and culture on there than on a standard, uncurated Youtube Shorts or Instagram Reels feed. AI-generated video presents some unique terrors to society, but I think most of the criticism of Sora could be directed equally to more 'traditional' social media. In any case, Sora is an impressive display of technology, but a poor product. I'm not too surprised it's getting killed.

Unlike, say, Seedance 2.0 (which has yet to come to the West), Sora 2 was more of a tech demo than anything usable:

* It was (assumedly) expensive to run.

* It was not good enough for customers to seriously pay for.

* There were too many content restrictions for it to be fun for most people.

Nothing of value was lost.

It was neat to be able to try my own prompts and get a sense of what the state of video generation was. But I certainly never generated something that I thought I got real value out of on its own merits, and I still don't understand why there was a social media component to the app.

Two separate problems killed it: novelty wore off for casual users, and content restrictions killed it for power users. Most engaging video content online is IP-based — memes, fan edits, remixes. Sora tried to build a social platform while banning the vocabulary that makes content worth sharing.

As a big user of ai video gen(my Google veo bill last month was $130) this doesn’t affect me in the slightest.

There’s so many video gen models out there and given the cheaper Chinese models I’m not surprised they closed this down. Besides the initial push, any marketing regarding video gen has always been the Kling or Higgsfield models. Just never a reason to do sora

It was fun, but from a business standpoint I’d have to think this was a giant pile of burning cash for OpenAI… even more so than the rest of OpenAI at the moment

First domino falls?

Seedance 2.0 is about to eat reap the market gap Sora creates. It's truly superior in every way. It felt like Sora was stunted by OpenAI for long, consistent video generation (not to mention the crazy red tape around what you could generate).

Are we sure it was in that order?

Sora clearly was a waste of ressources. I liked using it for a few days, but I could tell it was consuming an insane amount of compute for 10-15 second videos that only a dozen people might watch.

I think they have started seeing scratches in data center build up.

Sora was a perfect example of using a lot of compute to generate the video -> we need a lot of GPUs -> a lot of RAMs -> energy and land

I am predicting in the next 6 months RAM shortage will soften, not too much, because war in the Middle East will have additional impact for some time.

VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.

Sora was fun

But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.

Nowadays its strange that you put in a lot of efforts on a platform just to see these Goodbye messages, first digg was gone & now Sora.

This makes sense. OpenAI correctly realized overindexong on consumer where there isn’t money is not the right way. By not focusing on enterprise they ceded the market to Claude. Now they are rethinking and pivoting

It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.

Good riddance?

I can appreciate that the technology and research behind Sora could be helpful for many things, but I do not see anything good coming out of the consumer facing application.

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?

That jumping Sora logo always made the videos unwatchable for me. So distracting from the scene of Elvis fighting aliens or whatever I was watching.

Google gets stick for closing down applications after a decade. But OpenAI’s strategy seems to be to throw sh*t at the wall to see what sticks, but no company will (should) use a tool that could disappear in 6 months.

I tried using Sora for a month. Never paid for it. I tried many different ways of prompting and I was always underwhelmed by its output. The generation would also take so long and there was like a 50% chance it would fail due to content violations. I will say though that it was kind of addicting in a way. Just trying to crank the lever and see what would come out. But you'd always leave disappointed. It was a casino where the operator was losing money for every play.

I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..

It's just the social app being killed off, no? Wouldn't this line up with rumors that they'll soon let you create videos inside of chatgpt itself? I wish the actual video model would die but I assume this news is not that.

If they manage to compete with Anthropic in the enterprise market, are either of them able to reach profitability? To what degree are they subsidizing token usage and how tolerant are enterprise customers of significant price increases?

So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app?

There's a web interface as well.

It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is not something OAI can afford at this stage...

A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no longer needed now I guess :)

So long and good riddance.

One thing I'll give sora is that the remix feature actually required human input and enabled users to interact with each other through a novel means.

I never quite got "why" they made it a separate app. While I'm sure it was fun for a while, this felt like something that had limited staying power as the novelty is what was driving it. People don't really want to switch between video apps for their entertainment and having it be Sora only is too limiting.

Relevant Music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLhXesNkCI

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.

This is the indication of times ahead. Of AI services shutting down.

The cost must have been a key reason for the shutdown.

End is near.

I suspect the issue was Sora likely had a very low ratio of consumers to creators which makes a route to monetization unlikely. There was no incentives for doom scrolling consumers to migrate to Sora when they were already getting plenty of short form videos on FB, IG, and TikTok.

The network effects of the other two platforms are too strong, and a value prop of “watch similar videos but they’re all AI” is not strong for consumers.

Also, say what you want about AI slop, but I was on sora a lot for a few weeks and there was a real explosion of creativity on there. It felt new and exciting and creators were engaging with each other and sharing feedback and tips. I generated a ton of videos and surprised myself with a flury of creative ideas.

So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app

I think Sora was technically impressive as a concept. The way it was managed as a product wasn't good.

There didn't seem to be any marketing for it. Like I can't even remember an ad for it or any content creator type of person pushing Sora actively.

To get access to Sora I believe you needed to be on a paid plan?

It's really difficult to get user generated content going when it's behind a paywall.

It's also hard to tell if this means that openai is in trouble, or if this is just a badly managed product that deserved to be killed. With the negative sentiment on openai, folks might think the former.

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..

The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI cannot even protect THAT moat properly.

Google Graveyard is joined by OpenAI. That's one problem of those big corporations - they eagerly kill off products and projects willy-nilly. It may make businss sense but why the prior promo? Those promos have been a lie, just like the cake was.

the invisible hand of the market strangles its strongest adherents

The desire for something "new", for a Mildly Ethical product, killed off the most obvious path to success - to actually just make TikTok+AIGC, or in the present, Douyin+Seedance2.

Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?

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.

This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.

Generated video is useful and valuable, but Sora was not a frontier model.

Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.

turn out the schizos were right. most of OpenAI *real* investment money comes from Gulf countries. without that money flow they can't sustain the cash burn anymore.

From the linked Hollywood reporter article:

"...the AI company exits the video generation business."

"OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, is not getting out of the AI video business [...], of course... "

I hate journalism.

I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)

gpt-image-1.5 works decently for generating images compared to old Sora, but you pay per generation. It's possible that monthly flat rates were too much of a loss leader for OpenAI. I imagine the server side cost for generating video for Sora 2 is much higher as well.

Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models surpassing Sora's capabilities?

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 it’s for making what is essentially entertainment that many people hate on principle.

For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming table tennis player

I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with or without Disney's blessing.

Is this the thing that takes an already unusual video - an animal picking food from a Halloween candy on a porch caught on a porch cam - and turns it into a meme? The bear instead of the raccoon. Then turns into a cat playing a trumpet....then turns into massive spam where it turns into a grey area (a cat being surprised and chasing a dog with a mask) that gets reposted endlessly?

A record speed into AI slop. Is this what everything turns into when content creation becomes easy? what's happening here exactly?

What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service? They would have signed multi-year contracts.

I can't imagine they were getting a good return on it. And frankly, nothing tht came out of Sora was consequential in a positive way. The tech is cool, but only works if the content generation is heavily guardrailed and most of it ends up as content farming fodder anyway.

This move makes a lot of sense to me. It never felt like OpenAI was seriously going to try to launch a video-based social network. It was more of a fun way to demonstrate the power of the video generation models, and also to gauge the market and assess: if you put the power to generate videos in the hands of the people, what kinds of videos will they generate?

So OpenAI has done the right thing as a startup here, gotten lots of training data, and observed lots of user behavior that they can now apply going forward.

The Sora models, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere, and I believe OpenAI will continue to invest in them. They’re getting better and better, just like Google’s Veo, which is quite good at generating videos as well.

Using Codex and agent skills, it’s actually quite easy to generate a storyboard and then have a list of shots in that storyboard. Then generate videos from those storyboard stills, and then finally assemble those individual video files into a final movie file using something like ffmpeg. It's also very easy to create a voiceover with TTS and even simple music using ChatGPT Containers (aka the python tool).

This will 'democratize' (ha ha, for people with money obvi) a lot of video creation going forward. Against all wisdom, I am actually quite bullish on this technology, especially in the hands of young people. They are very creative and have lots of stories to share.

Necessary disclaimer as usual around the ethics of how these models were created: all the AI companies have totally ripped off artists in service of creating these models. I wish something would be done about that but I'm not holding my breath. No politician seems to want to touch it.

I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.

Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of Florida. Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis political attacks.

Apparently, all possible movies, cinematics and ads have been generated by "enthusiasts at home", so the tool is no longer needed.

On a more serious note, it could be a sign of a more powerful and general model being developed/released in the near future, that would include Sora capabilities. Or AI-doomers were right, and this sunset is one of the proofs for them.

Generative video is insanely expensive and OpenAI is burning through money. They need to use the compute on things that they actually might make money on - like enterprise Codex usage.

OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.

That company is run about as well as Loopt

Noo, they are taking it to loopt land

Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable. Reminds of tech bubble 1.

Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?

It was the greatest thing yesterday.

Couldn’t compete with Seedance?

Please name next attempt Roxis

Ed Zitron is going to be all over this

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.

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.

Good day for Kling.

Good riddance. Less slop machines the better.

For years now people have been saying Anthropic is falling behind because they don't have an image or video generation model. Turns out it was the right decision all along.

hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.

The only video generation tools showing any real progress or promise are world model-based. That's probably why they did this: either to refocus on coding/cowork type tools (less likely) or to devote that money and compute to building their answer to stuff like Project Genie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE

"Sora, generate a video of Mickey Mouse beating up Sam Altman."

we hardly knew ye

Let's be frank, this was probably too fucking expensive to run

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.

They need the GPU cycles to help target children to bomb for their new partnership with the US military.

an official post

> We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.

We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work. – The Sora Team

(https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382)

Sora was good but Gemini is so, so much better. And Seedance is on another dimension. But to be honest I'm shocked that they gave up on AI video. I wonder what the cause of that was?

The press release reads alike OpenAI slop.

bubble popping

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https://archive.ph/ABkeI

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Good riddence to bad trash. To me, this idea represents the absolute worst of the AI wave (out of a lot to choose from): a corporate controlled endless stream of the feelies to keep people plugged in and scrolling for nobody’s benefit except those in control of the output. If “entertainment” can be produced algorithmically to a volume and level of quality that the masses find attractive, it’s only a matter of time before bad (worse?) actors take control of it to start highly targeted campaigns of influence, far worse than what we’ve already seen.

“What you made with Sora mattered”. Idk why that sentence irks me so much. Perhaps because the “how” is bit vague. I like to think that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.

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"Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. "

Is it happening? :) /s

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How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?

Bahaha.

The owner of @Sora on twitter must be really regretting turning down the $20MM buyout offer for the handle!