OpenAI Shuts Down Sora AI Video, Disney Drops Planned $1B Investment
variety.com
OpenAI is planning to discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024. Disney has ended its partnership for Sora.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253

This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.

Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.

  • BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way

    • IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with “AI”, allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).

  • Sims@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    I think it was build on the original transformer architecture and as such took a shitload of compute and was slooow, so I guess they picked the wrong architecture and had to scrub the whole strategy. Huge loss… That also point to US not having enough cheap compute (compute->combined mem and processing) - likely from missing electricity. Lovely… Die Saltman, die, and Go go China !

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Go go China !

      Bops the tankie.

      Like, I have a Chinese LLM loaded right this second and follow them closely, but holy moly. Curb your enthusiasm.

      Anyway, OpenAI has plenty of compute to train a Sora 2 if they want, but apparently they don’t. My guess is some combination of:

      • They couldn’t figure out a more efficient architecture, like you speculated. I buy that. Tech bro development is way more conservative than you’d think, and video generation is inherently intense, especially if Sora 1 is the baseline.

      • …Maybe they looked at metrics, saw Sora is mostly used for spam and scams, and pulled the plug for liability reasons?

      • They’re focusing on short-term profitability, as other commenters mentioned.

      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        They’re focusing on short-term profitability hemorrhaging slightly less money, as other commenters mentioned.

        Quick nitpicky fix. The only way they don’t lose shit tons of money is if they shut down completely.

  • deathbird@mander.xyzEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won’t be coming back.

  • Abyssian@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    So many people seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. This isn’t ending AI video creation, it just cost them a lot of money to offer it. You can generate a video on your own computer already. AI video isn’t going away because one company isn’t letting people do it on their servers for free any more.

    • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Didn’t realise you could do it locally, just checked online and there’s several options. So why are these fuckers building huge, resource-greedy data centres. . ?

  • Fit_Series_573@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let’s hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.

    • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
      English
      0·
      7 months ago

      It still is for the creators there. Instead of browsing the algorithm I start on the subscriptions page, to only see uploads from people I actually want to.

      There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time. People just never got recommended the videos despite hitting all the buttons.

      For example, did you know both Physics Girl and Tom Scott have returned this month - hopefully a sign that the world can still heal.

      Some unsolicited add-on recommendations -

      Ublock origin - beyond the addblocking, I use the picker tool to filter all the extra sections like “news”, “trending” “you might like” etc.

      Unhook - toggles to disable a bunch of features like comments, home screen, end screen etc.

      Enhancer for Youtube - Themeing and a bunch of extra settings like setting defaults for each video. speed, volume, resolution, fill screen (which is different than full screen), PIP while you scroll comments. (The author just did a rework, so it can be a little bugged sometimes - reinstalling it fixed it for me last time it went wonky.

      • JayGray91🐉🍕@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        Edit 2: I checked the contact page for the dev and went through an archive site to check, and yep, I did recall correctly. it is the same extension. glad that the dev is back maintaining the firefox extension again! best youtube debullshittificator extension IMO

        Edit: I’ve checked the version history for the firefox extension and now I’m doubting myself. am I crazy? (yes, I am) was it another extension I’m thinking of?

        Wait, hold on. Enhancer for Youtube is back on Firefox? Correct me if I’m wrong, but IIRC the dev didn’t update the extension for firefox for a long time due to some policies mozilla have with extensions, and IIRC it has been stuck at 2.5 something whereas the chromium version gotten the 3.0.

        I’ve had to make do with another youtube extension since it keep bugging out.

        this is great news!

        • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
          English
          0·
          7 months ago

          I’m pretty certain, but could be remembering wrong, they paused development when YouTube/Google was going nuts breaking adblock, which broke the extension. The dev eventually removed their adblock and made everything else work.

  • GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn’t be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.

    But now that’s Google and Grok’s problems, I guess.

      • piranhaconda@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        I’ve had to do training at work that I’m fairly certain was mostly AI generated. The pics and audio seemed to be. And even the questions that I had to get right in order to complete the training… Some of them just weren’t covered in the training. Come on

        • johnyreeferseed@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          7 months ago

          I had a safety thing about a year ago and at the end it asked a question the the effect of " there’s broken glass on the shop floor, what should you do" . I picked the option to use a broom and dust pan but apparently the correct tool for glass clean up is a pair of tongs…

  • CodeBlooded@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    7 months ago

    I hate to hear this! I really enjoyed Sora. My friends and I made so many memes of each other on there. It was great for illustrating inside jokes.

    • Jyek@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Move it to precious metals or assets that historically average flatter value through crashes. The dollar is highly volatile in economic crisis.

    • Griffus@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      Or invest in non-US to keep them safe. Like Norwegian funds while the orange is oranging to gain on the oil price boom, and then spread out to European and emerging markets when he has his first public stroke in a few months.

      • Skankhunt420@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        7 months ago

        I’d be shocked if any other country let’s Americans use their banks and markets but I mean I guess its possible I know there’s forex and stuff like that.

        I’ve always heard no one wants Americans to open bank accounts if they aren’t living there

        • Griffus@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          7 months ago

          You have to be able to invest in stocks or funds outside US from a US trader? Even though I’ve sold most of my US assets, I still own some US stocks through my Scandinavian bank.

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      7 months ago

      I’d do this but its probably the wrong move. I tend to go with the steam method: do nothing while everyone else scrambles, profit.