OpenAI’s video app Sora launched last September. In no time, users started sharing generative slop, ripping off everything from Dragon Ball Z to SpongeBob. It’s now shutting down and a new Wall Street Journal report reveals why. It was shedding active users and costing the company a fortune. Allegedly $1 million a day, to be precise.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the platform peaked at 1 million daily users before eventually dwindling to less than 500,000. Still, making videos of CEO Sam Altman grilling Pikachu and Studio Ghibli-fying other copyrighted IP didn’t come cheap. “Sora was losing roughly a million dollars a day, according to a person familiar with the matter,” reads the report.
The AI-generated video sharing platform was meant to help OpenAI win over customers and convince a general public that’s rapidly becoming hostile toward LLMs that slop could be fun and cool. Disney was so on board it agreed to pay the company $1 billion for services to help Mickey hitch a ride aboard Altman’s AI express.
Outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger was telling investors in February that Sora-made videos would become part of a new short-form video offering on the streaming service Disney+. There were reportedly even plans for special versions of the tools to be licensed to the company so Disney executives could storyboard their own live-action remakes and god knows what else.
So it’s extra funny that Disney apparently had no idea OpenAI was about to pull the plug on its whole AI video thing until just an hour before the move was announced. Disney is left scrambling to find new AI partners and Altman’s slop factory is betting on robotics for its eventual payday instead.