this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Chime in if you disagreee, but there's really only 2 reasons a company like OpenAI shuts down a core service like Sora:
We already know that OpenAI is losing money on their generative "AI" products across the board, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, and the economic woes that come from rising hardware prices, oil and gas shortages, and another pointless war in the middle east only make the situation worse for them money-wise.
And so that really just leaves me to conclude that Sora has not maintained the level of popularity and growth needed to impress investors as Q1 comes to a close. Whether it's users, subscriptions, or time, they must have looked at the numbers and really didn't like what they saw.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the ridiculous "AI" bubble, and the start of a new tech sector correction.
i heard sora uses around several MW of electricity just for a short 5-20second videos. extremely high cost.
There's a third option this time.
It uses a lot of resources they can use immediately for the military contract that will now inevitably form the backbone of the company and effectively will mean they have won the AI war. Anthropic fumbled by not doing what the military wanted immediately, and showing a minimal backbone publicly.
I listened to a Vox’s Today Explained that tackled this whole contract. What was said on there was that Anthropic had in some very minor stipulations about AI and war, but were rejected. OpenAI came in with their offer and then after getting it, the contract they signed had the wording that Anthropic was asking for.
It basically came down to, Altman was the favorite of the Trump administration and got the contract because of behind the scenes bullshit and because Dario was/is super critical of Trump when it comes to AI safety.
In addition, marketing AI with image generation is a lot easier of a way to impress the public than the more technical applications, or the frightening prospect of the "security" applications, but image generation is only a good use of resources as advertisment, and the introductory phase is over.
useful for propaganda videos thats what trump and other conservatives want to "trick people" that it is true whats being shown.
I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.
Fake or highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating online proporting that the Netanyahu hand videos, and random videos of Israeli strikes on Palestine (which I assume are to discredit actual video of the atrocities happening there), have been going viral for awhile now.
Advertising is probably one of the few industries that can use image generation and video generation via AI LLM in a way that would actually cut costs but the downside is people are increasingly militantly against ads and they are against AI generated content including ads, so this isn't likely to become the reality any time soon.
If the McDonald's ad and others like it had been better vetted for AI uncanny valley aspects and hallucinations that cause trucks to transform into short bus versions of themselves mid ad spot etc, the public might not have paid attention at all.
And lots of those same advertising firms are using AI to their benefit behind the scenes to purchase ad space. But using AI in ads in a public facing way is a dream out of reach for them for now because they bungled it so bad.
You're right. I should have specified "publicly accessable" image generation.
I think they intend to IPO this year and need to slow the hemorrhaging funds quickly to be more appealing to the stock market.
I guess. But shrinking the scope of their products doesnt exactly inspire the idea of infinite growth.
Finger crossed, my friend! Fingers crossed.
Or 3 massive liability/ lawsuit /investigation about to be announced.
I suspect it's that they got eclipsed by ByteDance with Seedance 2.0.
The video for that model is really good and makes Sora look pretty meh, and it may have been that current work on a next gen Sora wasn't going to be competitive enough.
The worst thing a lab can do right now is look like they are falling behind (i.e. Meta), especially with OpenAI planning for an IPO.
So on top of the lackluster "social media" offering tied to Sora they decided to shutter the entire product line of video and pivot to enterprise (where they've already lost significant market share to Anthropic).
They're in a pretty meh place at the moment overall tbh. I'm skeptical they'll recover.
(But I wouldn't mistake their fumbling for an industry wide shift on AI in general or even video AI.)
The market for professional video is fairly small, and most of the cost is in sales. ie. the advertising agency, or movie/show pitch that demands the producers get rich independent of production costs.
. Ai companies want to replace all YouTube , and TikTok,creators with ai video content farms, capturing the creator market and if it scales the streaming market. Instead of getting a cut gen ai would let platforms eat the whole pie alone.
A significant number of smaller creators I watch have drastically increased the quality of animations and b roll by using ai tools.
These tool are a big deal to a big market.