Goodbye to Sora

strongpigeon

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.

throw4847285

Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago? https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/

mcast

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

ronsor

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.

nprz

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

taytus

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

noemit

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

helsinkiandrew

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.

arkadiytehgraet

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.

iainctduncan

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

Imnimo

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.

timpera

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.

ChrisArchitect

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 )

password54321

"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

softwaredoug

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.

Sir_Twist

> 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?

_doctor_love

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.

mikhmha

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..

harlequinetcie

Are we sure it was in that order?

singingwolfboy

https://archive.ph/ABkeI