8 ms·

Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

182 points by warrenm 11mo ago

zerosizedweasle 11mo ago
"Whether Sora lasts or not, however, is somewhat beside the point. What catches my attention most is that OpenAI released this app in the first place. It wasn’t that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb , and many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he proclaimed 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated by LLM-based tools." That's the thing, this has all been predicated on the notion that AGI is next. That's what the money is chasing, why it's sucked in astronomical investments. It's cool, but that's not why Nvidia is a multi trillion dollar company. It's that value because it was promised to be the brainpower behind AGI.
- cratermoon 11mo ago
  What was predicted to be next: AGI What we got next: porn
  - droptablemain 11mo ago
    to be fair we also got Stephen Hawking bungee jumping | snowboarding | wrestling | drag racing | ice skating | bull-fighting | half-pipe
  - c0balt 11mo ago
    To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned models. I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was astonishing.
  - knicholes 11mo ago
    Wait, we got porn?
    - benbayard 11mo ago
      Yes, Sam A said that "erotica" was coming to openAI. I don't think he's mentioned visual pornography though https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-mental-health https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-ment...
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
  - blibble 11mo ago
    I can't imagine the republican party is going to be particularly happy about AI being used for mass porn generation
    - neonnoodle 11mo ago
      prompt records = mass blackmail generation
    - overfeed 11mo ago
      The party of grindr-crashing sexual repression[1] outwardly denounces such depravity, but inwardly rejoices at all the shameful images they intend to generate. 1. Red states are way ahead on porn consumption, based on past annual reports by Aylo.
  - quantified 11mo ago
    Porn has driven everyday tech. Online payment systems, broadband adoption. Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across different religions, cultures, technological capabilities. We're humans. There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity. Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in that shared content, could lead to problems.
    - noir_lord 11mo ago
      > There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity. Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships still look at porn. It's just human.
      - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
        >Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships still look at porn. How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"?
        skylurk 11mo ago
        I, uh, have a friend, who tells me watching porn with their partner once in a while, can be pretty hot.
        quantified 11mo ago
        Works for me. You end up travelling for a week away from your partner, they're sick for a while, etc.
        jrflowers 11mo ago
        > How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"? You either believe what people report, the clearly-stated position on erotic material of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (1), or you can just imagine in your head what you think other people’s sex lives are like and just believe whatever you come up with. 1. https://www.aasect.org/our-mission.html https://www.aasect.org/our-mission.html
  - layer8 11mo ago
    At least the valuations make sense now. ;)
- Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
  What signals have you seen that point to investment being predicated around AGI? Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts. That's a much more "sober" outlook than AGI. In fact a fun thing to think about is what signals we could observe in markets that specifically call out AGI as the expectation as opposed to simple bullish outlook on inference usage.
  - port3000 11mo ago
    "Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts" AI is already integrated into every single Google search, as well as Slack, Notion, Teams, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Zoom, Google Meet, Figma, Hubspot, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Basecamp, Evernote, Dropbox, Salesforce, Canva, Photoshop, Airtable, Gmail, LinkedIn, Shopify, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, ClickUp, Miro, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Docusign, Workday .....so where is this 100X increase in inference demand going to come from? Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-seeing-slowing-download-growth-and-daily-use-analysis-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see...
    - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
      Integrations and inference costs aren't necessarily 1:1. Integrations can use more AI, reasoning models can cause token explosion, Jevons Paradox can drive more inference tokens, big businesses and government agencies (around the world, not just the US) can begin using more LLMs. I'm not sure integrations are that simple. A lot of integrations that I know of are very basic integrations. > Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see... While I haven't read the article yet, if this is true then yes this could be an indication of consumer app style inference (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) waning which will put more pressure on industrial/tool inference uses to buoy up costs.
- mola 11mo ago
  I think the motivation for someone like Altman is not AGI, it's power and influence. And when he wields billions he has power, it doesn't really matter if there's AGI coming.
  - hu3 11mo ago
    Yep, he just wants to become too big to fail at this point. I view OpenAI like a pyramid scheme: taking in increasing amounts of money to pursuit ever growing promisses that can be dangled like a carrot to the next investor. If you owe investors $100 million, that's your problem. If you owe investors $100 billion, that's their problem.
    - AbstractH24 11mo ago
      Who else pursued this strategy in the dot-com bubble and failed to the point of going under? I'm old enough to remember it, but young enough not to remember it well.
- tmaly 11mo ago
  We were promised AGI and all we are getting is Bob Ross coloring on the walls of a Target store. The app is fun to use for about 10 minutes then that is it. Same goes for Grok imagine. All people want to do is generate NSFW content. What happened to improving the world?
  - qwery 11mo ago
    I apologise for talking past the point you're making, but, Bob Ross was a human being, you know, with thoughts and stuff. How could any of these AI toys possibly compare? I would love to have Bob Ross, wielding a crayon, add some happy little trees to the walls of a Target.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- standardUser 11mo ago
  AGI is like L5 automated driving - academic concepts that have no bearing on the ability of these technologies to transform the economy.
  - hollerith 11mo ago
    And no bearing on the ability of these technologies to thoroughly screw us.
marshfarm 11mo ago
Was a mistake from the beginning to use language as the basis for tokens and embedded spaces between them to generate semantics. It wasn't thought out, it was a snowball trial and error that went out of control.
- bongodongobob 11mo ago
  Lol ok. We'll wait for your game changing technology, keep us posted.
  - kick_in_the_dor 11mo ago
    OP has a point. Are these type of embeddings the best way to model thought?
    - brokensegue 11mo ago
      it's the best way we've found so far?
    - mentalgear 11mo ago
      Certainly not the best, just the most practical / commercially sell-able. And once a pattern, like LLM text embedding is established as the way to "AGI", it takes years for other more realistic approaches to gain funding again. Gary Marcus wrote about this extensively how legitimate AGI research is actually being put back years due to the LLM superficial AGI hype.
      - marshfarm 11mo ago
        I think the best way would have been to assume thought is wordless (as the science tells us now), and images and probability (as symbols) are still arbitrary. That was the threshold to cross. Neither neurosymbolic, nor neuromorphic get there. Nor will any "world model" achieve anything as models are arbitrary. Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of tools to employ for intelligence. Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of expanding, comp sci became too reductive. The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little math training could A/B test vast swaths of information gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and the intel vanished into zombiehood. Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a composite for all that parallel.
Sohcahtoa82 11mo ago
I'm more concerned about Sora (and video-generating AI in general) being the final pour that cements us into our post-truth world. People will be swayed by AI-generated videos while also being convinced real videos are AI. I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.
- kazinator 11mo ago
  Here is the thing: we should never have trusted photographs and motion pictures. Fakery isn't new, only the product of scale and quality at which it is becoming possible.
- pmontra 11mo ago
  Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person because videos will be devoid of trust. On the other side we want to believe in something, so we'll believe in the video that will suit our beliefs. It's an interesting struggle.
  - bilekas 11mo ago
    Yeah I'm just as annoyed with the AI slop that's coming out as anyone, but the next generation of voters won't believe a thing and so they will be pushed towards believing what they see in real life like campaigners who go door to door etc. It could be a great thing and would give meaning to he electoral system again ironically!
    - kulahan 11mo ago
      Honestly I can't see a solution beyond concentrating power to highly localized regions. Lots more mayors, city councils, etc. so there is a real chance you can meet someone who represents you. I don't fully believe anything I see on the internet that isn't backed up by at least two independent sources. Even then, I've probably been tricked at least once.
      - bilekas 11mo ago
        It may come to that, where the federal power is less influential and there to mainly manage overall services of the nation etc, and then the local states let's say manage themselves, if I'm not wrong that was kind of the original idea of the great experiment. It doesn't sound inherently wrong untill you add tribalism into the mix where people are not working with eachother, but that seems to be the major push these days, at least that's the sentiment I get. Would that change, maybe not, but maybe it would lessen the power grabs that some small few seem to gravitate towards. I know if I wanted to influence the major elections, OpenAI, Google and Meta would be the first places I would go. That's a very small group of points of failure. Elections recently seem to be quite narrow, maybe they were before too though, but that kind of power is a silent soft power that really goes unchecked. If people are more in tune with being mislead, that power can slowly degrade.
mentalgear 11mo ago
The fact that OpenAI is pushing Sora, and Altman now even hinting at introducing "erotic roleplay"[0] makes it obvious: openAI has stopped being a real AI research lab. Now, they’re just another desperate player in a no-moat market, scrambling to become the primary platform of this hype era and imprison users onto their platform, just like Microsoft and Facebook did before in the PC and social era. [0] https://www.404media.co/openai-sam-altman-interview-chatgpt-erotica/?ref=weekly-roundup-newsletter https://www.404media.co/openai-sam-altman-interview-chatgpt-...
- gilfoy 11mo ago
  Why is it one or the other? They have enough money to do both.
  - mentalgear 11mo ago
    But if you followed them, there are focusing only on product for the last 2 years. The grand GPT-5 and their scaling laws, from which all their LLM AGI hopes originated, turned out to be a dud.
- sixothree 11mo ago
  The amount of animal abuse videos I've seen is a bit disturbing. It only demonstrates how careless they have been, possibly intentionally. I know people on HN have been describing the various reasons why OpenAI has not been a good player, but seeing it first-hand is visceral in a way that makes me concerned about them as a company.
bilekas 11mo ago
I got the feeling when this was released that it was just another metric to justify further investment, they were guaranteed to have a lot of users, they can turn around and say "well we have 2 huge applications and were just getting started" investors don't care too much about product quality we've seen, just large numbers.
JohnMakin 11mo ago
It's made my non-sora feeds nearly inconsumable, which I admitted to myself was probably a good thing.
schnable 11mo ago
OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once, trying to leverage the value of the frontier model, brand value, and massive number of eyeballs they own. Sora is just one of many. Some will fail and maybe some will succeed. It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to do with Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't think there's more to read into it than that.
- truelson 11mo ago
  It's to their benefit to try everything right now. And quickly.
- furyofantares 11mo ago
  > It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next model. I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they reduced their free tier limits.
- FloorEgg 11mo ago
  On some level they know that LLMs alone won't lead to AGI so they have to take a shotgun approach to diversify, and also because integrating some parts of all these paths is more likely to lead to the outcome they want than going all in on one. Also because they have the funding to do it. Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox, etc, This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech startup/company in an important new category looks like.
- xnx 11mo ago
  > OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing, etc. OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora) and other competitors.
truelson 11mo ago
I love Cal. I really, really take his thoughts on many things to heart for well over a decade now. I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some confounding factors why. Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was still absoutely magical. There's still so much here. But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems, advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has popped. Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish it was more nuanced.
- kulahan 11mo ago
  LLMs are only valuable to me at the moment explicitly because ads are not part of the scene. Maybe for a while others will use it, but it will be on the exact same treadmill as anything else ad-based: you will become the product, any recommendations are worthless trash, and it is oriented to show as many ads as possible, rather than providing useful content. Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a natural fit, but a terrible one.
righthand 11mo ago
Any Llm generation tools are spam generation tools. AI-slop === Spam. How big is the market for spam again?
- mentalgear 11mo ago
  Unfortunately due to the generation / verification ratio, spam and misinformation are indeed their most low-hanging fruits. It's so much easier to generate LLM output than to verify it, which is probably why Google held back the Transformer Architecture.
- kulahan 11mo ago
  This isn't even remotely true. In its current iteration, it's one of the best jumping-off points for getting up to speed on the basics of a new topic.
  - righthand 11mo ago
    So is spam if you only need a summarized version of the financial difficulties of princes in Nigeria. Or the kinds of people doctors can’t stand. Your jumping off point is a cliff into a pile of leaves. It looks correct and comfy but will hurt your butt taking it for granted. You’re telling people to jump and saying “it’ll get better eventually just keep jumping and ignore the pain!”
    - kulahan 11mo ago
      Nope, spam is specifically unwanted. Also, I'm saying "jump in the leaves, it's fun if you don't try leaping in from a mile up" and you're saying "NO LEAVES KILL PEOPLE ALL THE TIME" lol.
      - righthand 11mo ago
        What if I don’t want to use Llms, but people keep telling me that it’s fine and I should. Isn’t that spam? What if my reason isn’t, “I like typing code” but instead, “we don’t need more Googles doing Google things and abusing privacy.” Then personally the whole thing is spam. Regardless of what the reasons for and against Llms maybe doesn’t obfuscate that the primary use case for generated content has been to scam and spam people. That spam scam can be simply getting people to pour their personal private info into an Llm or it can be ads or a generated lie. Regardless it’s unwanted to a lot of people. And the history of that tech and attempt at normalizing it are founded in spam techniques. Even the gratuitous search for AGI is spammed on us as these companies take tax payer money and build out infrastructure that’s actually available to 0% of the public for use. Like I discredit in my mind anyone that cites Chatgpt as a source.
rpjt 11mo ago
I have no FOMO when it comes to Sora. None whatsoever. Authenticity is becoming more important day by day.
kbos87 11mo ago
I could see Sora having a significant negative impact on short form video products like TikTok if they don’t quickly and accurately find a way to categorize its use. A steady stream of AI generated video content hurts the value prop of short form video in more than one way… It quickly desensitizes you and takes the surprise out that drives consumption of a lot of content. It also of course leaves you feeling like you can’t trust anything you see.
- kulahan 11mo ago
  Do people on the dopamine drip really care how real their content is? Tons and tons of it is staged or modified anyways. I'm not sure there's anything Real™ on TikTok anyways.
  - wobfan 11mo ago
    Thought the same. The human-generated content is just as brainless as the AI-generated slop. People who watched the first will also watch the latter. This will not change a lot, I think.
  - bemmu 11mo ago
    I find Sora refreshing in that I don't have to worry about being tricked by something fake. It's just a fun multiplayer slopfest.
  - duxup 11mo ago
    It certainly seems there are some who don't care. You always get the "who cares if it is fake" folks and even on reddit folks will point out something is AI and inevitably folks "who cares". But I'm not sure how many people that is or what kind of content they care or don't care about.
    - janwl 11mo ago
      I mean, it's entertainment content. It's like saying a movie is fake, they are actors playing roles. Of course. Who cares?
gdulli 11mo ago
> A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. But also, a company that earnestly believes that it's about to disrupt most labor is going to want to grab as many of those bucks as possible before people no longer have income.
xwowsersx 11mo ago
This take feels like classic Cal Newport pattern-matching: something looks vaguely "consumerish," so it must signal decline. It's a huge overreach. Whether OpenAI becomes a truly massive, world-defining company is an open question, but it's not going to be decided by Sora. Treating a research-facing video generator as if it's OpenAI's attempt at the next TikTok is just missing the forest for the trees. Sora isn't a product bet, it's a technology demo or a testbed for video and image modeling. They threw a basic interface on top so people could actually use it. If they shut that interface down tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing about the underlying progress in generative modeling. You can argue that OpenAI lacks focus, or that they waste energy on these experiments. That's a reasonable discussion. But calling it "the beginning of the end" because of one side project is just unserious. Tech companies at the frontier run hundreds of little prototypes like this... most get abandoned, and that's fine. The real question about OpenAI's future has nothing to do with Sora. It's whether large language and multimodal models eventually become a zero-margin commodity. If that happens, OpenAI's valuation problem isn't about branding or app strategy, it's about economics. Can they build a moat beyond "we have the biggest model"? Because that won't hold once opensource and fine-tuned domain models catch up. So sure, Sora might be a distraction. But pretending that a minor interface launch is some great unraveling of OpenAI's trajectory is just lazy narrative-hunting.
- bossyTeacher 11mo ago
  I agree. My bet is that OpenAI will not fullfill its mission of developing AGI by 2035. And I would be surprised if they ever did. As much as they might want to, there is only so many dreams you can whisper into rich people's ears before they tell you to go away. And without rich people's money, OpenAI will fall like a house of cards. The wealthy won't have infinite patience
- impossiblefork 11mo ago
  There are also interesting things one could do with models like Sora, depending how it actually performs in practice: prompting to segment, for example; and the thing could very possibly, if it's fast enough etc. become a foundation for robotics.
- softwaredoug 11mo ago
ilickpoolalgae 11mo ago
> It’s unclear whether this app will last. One major issue is the back-end expense of producing these videos. For now, OpenAI requires a paid ChatGPT Plus account to generate your own content. At the $20 tier, you can pump out up to 50 low-resolution videos per month. For a whopping $200 a month, you can generate more videos at higher resolutions. None of this compares favorably to competitors like TikTok, which are exponentially cheaper to operate and can therefore not only remain truly free for all users, but actually pay their creators . fwiw, there's no requirement to have a subscription to create content.
- draw_down 11mo ago
  [dead]
sosodev 11mo ago
This article makes the claim that OpenAI, and AI in general, is massively overhyped because OpenAI is looking to sell slop. I'm not sure I can agree with that basic premise. Whether AGI does or does not materialize sometime soon doesn't matter. OpenAI, like every company who wants to raise massive amounts of money, needs to show huge growth numbers now. It seems like the unfortunate, simple truth is that slop is a growth hack.
micromacrofoot 11mo ago
OpenAI is steering significant amounts of traffic away from Google and ChatGPT is a fairly common name that extends beyond awareness of the company (or even what the word it means specifically). Not nearly on the level of "Kleenex" or "Google" as a term, but impressive given that other companies have spent decades trying to make a similar dent.
- rchaud 11mo ago
  So what though? At best they will stuff it with ads like Google has done and become what is basically Bing w/ Copilot. That isn't going to pay back the $500 billion or however much they're trying to raise.
  - micromacrofoot 11mo ago
    it means I highly doubt it's the "beginning of the end" as postulated... unless it's a very very long end as another example: tesla has strung along a known overvaluation for a long time now and there's no end in sight despite a number of blunders
ath3nd 11mo ago
[dead]
FrustratedMonky 11mo ago
When you have this much money, you can afford to chase AGI, and assign a few people to make an app. The app might be frivolous, but it keep OpenAI in the public view. It's money well spent on marketing.
1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago
"It wasn't that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb, and many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he proclaimed* 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated* by LLM-based tools. A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn't be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn't be entertaining the idea, as Altman did last week, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy"
- freefaler 11mo ago
  They might be forced to do so because the current inference pricing is not really covered by the 20$ monthly fee. Who knows what they have promised to the investors and the real cashflow is hard to be certain about with the circular nature of cross-investing between the biggest players.
bdcravens 11mo ago
More likely it's the beginning of the end for TikTok, since the amount of posts that use seems to be flooding the platform, lowering trust and credibility in each video.
- fishmicrowaver 11mo ago
  Hmm I have my doubts. I don't really understand the appeal of hyper-consumerism, brand focus, and big SM platform engagement. But I look over at my wife and she is clearly plugged in to a giant worldwide cultural movement of womens interests, product recommendations, and politics. It also appears to be the case that women are less likely to engage with AI. It's one of the big reasons I think it's a massive blunder to pursue AI erotica. I think a big part of the TikTok user base (women) will have to be persuaded to jump on the AI bandwagon and I'm not sure the industry is pursuing any products or features to woo that market.
  - sandspar 11mo ago
    The subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI has 37,000 subscribers. And in the fantasy and science fiction section of big chain bookstores, 90% of the titles are porn for women. Women are absolutely the target market for text porn.
f33d5173 11mo ago
> wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos This isn't a money making venture for them, and you basically admitted as much. They poured no doubt massive amounts of money into developing this and have little hope of earning it back soon. This is an attempt to keep up with other ai companies also developing video models in order to not look behind to investors. Making it available to users is similarly about increasing active user counts in order to look more successful. If people incidentally get off to it that's not their concern
Nimitz14 11mo ago
Sora is about data gathering. This take is too simplistic.
softwaredoug 11mo ago
The counter argument is that OpenAI has to make fairly bolder moves. Social was _already_ becoming the domain of AI generated content. In the benign sense, there's been social content of people sharing their silly AI content since early DALL-e. Its a good idea to make a social app that's actually _about that_, because you can remix and play with the content in a novel way. The first Sora was sort of already going in this direction.
techblueberry 11mo ago
When fast take-off starts to be evident later next year, it’s the fact that OpenAI has built its hoard on a diverse set of product lines with a broad surface area to operate on that will be the differentiator allowing them to lead on the exponential before anyone else.
qustrolabe 11mo ago
That a funny title to give to OpenAI's side gig that went to top downloads in days
firemelt 11mo ago
SOMEONE POP IT PWEASEE
zduoduo 11mo ago
I don't think this is the case
erelong 11mo ago
I think some of the detractors or skeptics of AI developments like this are highly underestimating the value of these kinds of innovations like Sora, maybe because they are focusing on less productive uses of video generation (so they seem to call a lot of it "slop") I would think instead about educational or instructional videos: now instead of hunt for them online or producing them yourself somewhat "manually", you could just use AI technology to create them. That seems "massively" beneficial and useful. To dismiss these kinds of developments sounds akin to dismissing the development of the ability to write because "people will only use writing to make erotic fiction or jokes" (!). No one would say that. Or to developing cameras because people will "only take indecent or goofy pictures with them" (!). Maybe people are not making as much "useful" educational or instructional material, that's fair to say.

182 points by warrenm 11mo ago

"Whether Sora lasts or not, however, is somewhat beside the point. What catches my attention most is that OpenAI released this app in the first place. It wasn’t that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb , and many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he proclaimed 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated by LLM-based tools." That's the thing, this has all been predicated on the notion that AGI is next. That's what the money is chasing, why it's sucked in astronomical investments. It's cool, but that's not why Nvidia is a multi trillion dollar company. It's that value because it was promised to be the brainpower behind AGI.

cratermoon 11mo ago
What was predicted to be next: AGI What we got next: porn
- droptablemain 11mo ago
  to be fair we also got Stephen Hawking bungee jumping | snowboarding | wrestling | drag racing | ice skating | bull-fighting | half-pipe
- c0balt 11mo ago
  To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned models. I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was astonishing.
- knicholes 11mo ago
  Wait, we got porn?
  - benbayard 11mo ago
    Yes, Sam A said that "erotica" was coming to openAI. I don't think he's mentioned visual pornography though https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-mental-health https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-ment...
    - deleted 11mo ago
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- blibble 11mo ago
  I can't imagine the republican party is going to be particularly happy about AI being used for mass porn generation
  - neonnoodle 11mo ago
    prompt records = mass blackmail generation
  - overfeed 11mo ago
    The party of grindr-crashing sexual repression[1] outwardly denounces such depravity, but inwardly rejoices at all the shameful images they intend to generate. 1. Red states are way ahead on porn consumption, based on past annual reports by Aylo.
- quantified 11mo ago
  Porn has driven everyday tech. Online payment systems, broadband adoption. Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across different religions, cultures, technological capabilities. We're humans. There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity. Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in that shared content, could lead to problems.
  - noir_lord 11mo ago
    > There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity. Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships still look at porn. It's just human.
    - bossyTeacher 11mo ago
      >Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships still look at porn. How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"?
      - skylurk 11mo ago
        I, uh, have a friend, who tells me watching porn with their partner once in a while, can be pretty hot.
      - quantified 11mo ago
        Works for me. You end up travelling for a week away from your partner, they're sick for a while, etc.
      - jrflowers 11mo ago
        > How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"? You either believe what people report, the clearly-stated position on erotic material of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (1), or you can just imagine in your head what you think other people’s sex lives are like and just believe whatever you come up with. 1. https://www.aasect.org/our-mission.html https://www.aasect.org/our-mission.html
- layer8 11mo ago
  At least the valuations make sense now. ;)
Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
What signals have you seen that point to investment being predicated around AGI? Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts. That's a much more "sober" outlook than AGI. In fact a fun thing to think about is what signals we could observe in markets that specifically call out AGI as the expectation as opposed to simple bullish outlook on inference usage.
- port3000 11mo ago
  "Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts" AI is already integrated into every single Google search, as well as Slack, Notion, Teams, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Zoom, Google Meet, Figma, Hubspot, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Basecamp, Evernote, Dropbox, Salesforce, Canva, Photoshop, Airtable, Gmail, LinkedIn, Shopify, Asana, Trello, Monday.com, ClickUp, Miro, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Linear, Docusign, Workday .....so where is this 100X increase in inference demand going to come from? Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-seeing-slowing-download-growth-and-daily-use-analysis-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see...
  - Karrot_Kream 11mo ago
    Integrations and inference costs aren't necessarily 1:1. Integrations can use more AI, reasoning models can cause token explosion, Jevons Paradox can drive more inference tokens, big businesses and government agencies (around the world, not just the US) can begin using more LLMs. I'm not sure integrations are that simple. A lot of integrations that I know of are very basic integrations. > Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-see... While I haven't read the article yet, if this is true then yes this could be an indication of consumer app style inference (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) waning which will put more pressure on industrial/tool inference uses to buoy up costs.
mola 11mo ago
I think the motivation for someone like Altman is not AGI, it's power and influence. And when he wields billions he has power, it doesn't really matter if there's AGI coming.
- hu3 11mo ago
  Yep, he just wants to become too big to fail at this point. I view OpenAI like a pyramid scheme: taking in increasing amounts of money to pursuit ever growing promisses that can be dangled like a carrot to the next investor. If you owe investors $100 million, that's your problem. If you owe investors $100 billion, that's their problem.
  - AbstractH24 11mo ago
    Who else pursued this strategy in the dot-com bubble and failed to the point of going under? I'm old enough to remember it, but young enough not to remember it well.
tmaly 11mo ago
We were promised AGI and all we are getting is Bob Ross coloring on the walls of a Target store. The app is fun to use for about 10 minutes then that is it. Same goes for Grok imagine. All people want to do is generate NSFW content. What happened to improving the world?
- qwery 11mo ago
  I apologise for talking past the point you're making, but, Bob Ross was a human being, you know, with thoughts and stuff. How could any of these AI toys possibly compare? I would love to have Bob Ross, wielding a crayon, add some happy little trees to the walls of a Target.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
standardUser 11mo ago
AGI is like L5 automated driving - academic concepts that have no bearing on the ability of these technologies to transform the economy.
- hollerith 11mo ago
  And no bearing on the ability of these technologies to thoroughly screw us.

marshfarm 11mo ago

Was a mistake from the beginning to use language as the basis for tokens and embedded spaces between them to generate semantics. It wasn't thought out, it was a snowball trial and error that went out of control.

bongodongobob 11mo ago
Lol ok. We'll wait for your game changing technology, keep us posted.
- kick_in_the_dor 11mo ago
  OP has a point. Are these type of embeddings the best way to model thought?
  - brokensegue 11mo ago
    it's the best way we've found so far?
  - mentalgear 11mo ago
    Certainly not the best, just the most practical / commercially sell-able. And once a pattern, like LLM text embedding is established as the way to "AGI", it takes years for other more realistic approaches to gain funding again. Gary Marcus wrote about this extensively how legitimate AGI research is actually being put back years due to the LLM superficial AGI hype.
    - marshfarm 11mo ago
      I think the best way would have been to assume thought is wordless (as the science tells us now), and images and probability (as symbols) are still arbitrary. That was the threshold to cross. Neither neurosymbolic, nor neuromorphic get there. Nor will any "world model" achieve anything as models are arbitrary. Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of tools to employ for intelligence. Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of expanding, comp sci became too reductive. The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little math training could A/B test vast swaths of information gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and the intel vanished into zombiehood. Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a composite for all that parallel.

Sohcahtoa82 11mo ago

I'm more concerned about Sora (and video-generating AI in general) being the final pour that cements us into our post-truth world. People will be swayed by AI-generated videos while also being convinced real videos are AI. I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.

kazinator 11mo ago
Here is the thing: we should never have trusted photographs and motion pictures. Fakery isn't new, only the product of scale and quality at which it is becoming possible.
pmontra 11mo ago
Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person because videos will be devoid of trust. On the other side we want to believe in something, so we'll believe in the video that will suit our beliefs. It's an interesting struggle.
- bilekas 11mo ago
  Yeah I'm just as annoyed with the AI slop that's coming out as anyone, but the next generation of voters won't believe a thing and so they will be pushed towards believing what they see in real life like campaigners who go door to door etc. It could be a great thing and would give meaning to he electoral system again ironically!
  - kulahan 11mo ago
    Honestly I can't see a solution beyond concentrating power to highly localized regions. Lots more mayors, city councils, etc. so there is a real chance you can meet someone who represents you. I don't fully believe anything I see on the internet that isn't backed up by at least two independent sources. Even then, I've probably been tricked at least once.
    - bilekas 11mo ago
      It may come to that, where the federal power is less influential and there to mainly manage overall services of the nation etc, and then the local states let's say manage themselves, if I'm not wrong that was kind of the original idea of the great experiment. It doesn't sound inherently wrong untill you add tribalism into the mix where people are not working with eachother, but that seems to be the major push these days, at least that's the sentiment I get. Would that change, maybe not, but maybe it would lessen the power grabs that some small few seem to gravitate towards. I know if I wanted to influence the major elections, OpenAI, Google and Meta would be the first places I would go. That's a very small group of points of failure. Elections recently seem to be quite narrow, maybe they were before too though, but that kind of power is a silent soft power that really goes unchecked. If people are more in tune with being mislead, that power can slowly degrade.

mentalgear 11mo ago

The fact that OpenAI is pushing Sora, and Altman now even hinting at introducing "erotic roleplay"[0] makes it obvious: openAI has stopped being a real AI research lab. Now, they’re just another desperate player in a no-moat market, scrambling to become the primary platform of this hype era and imprison users onto their platform, just like Microsoft and Facebook did before in the PC and social era. [0] https://www.404media.co/openai-sam-altman-interview-chatgpt-erotica/?ref=weekly-roundup-newsletter https://www.404media.co/openai-sam-altman-interview-chatgpt-...

gilfoy 11mo ago
Why is it one or the other? They have enough money to do both.
- mentalgear 11mo ago
  But if you followed them, there are focusing only on product for the last 2 years. The grand GPT-5 and their scaling laws, from which all their LLM AGI hopes originated, turned out to be a dud.
sixothree 11mo ago
The amount of animal abuse videos I've seen is a bit disturbing. It only demonstrates how careless they have been, possibly intentionally. I know people on HN have been describing the various reasons why OpenAI has not been a good player, but seeing it first-hand is visceral in a way that makes me concerned about them as a company.

bilekas 11mo ago

I got the feeling when this was released that it was just another metric to justify further investment, they were guaranteed to have a lot of users, they can turn around and say "well we have 2 huge applications and were just getting started" investors don't care too much about product quality we've seen, just large numbers.

JohnMakin 11mo ago

It's made my non-sora feeds nearly inconsumable, which I admitted to myself was probably a good thing.

schnable 11mo ago

OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once, trying to leverage the value of the frontier model, brand value, and massive number of eyeballs they own. Sora is just one of many. Some will fail and maybe some will succeed. It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to do with Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't think there's more to read into it than that.

truelson 11mo ago
It's to their benefit to try everything right now. And quickly.
furyofantares 11mo ago
> It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next model. I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they reduced their free tier limits.
FloorEgg 11mo ago
On some level they know that LLMs alone won't lead to AGI so they have to take a shotgun approach to diversify, and also because integrating some parts of all these paths is more likely to lead to the outcome they want than going all in on one. Also because they have the funding to do it. Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox, etc, This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech startup/company in an important new category looks like.
xnx 11mo ago
> OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing, etc. OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora) and other competitors.

truelson 11mo ago

I love Cal. I really, really take his thoughts on many things to heart for well over a decade now. I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some confounding factors why. Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was still absoutely magical. There's still so much here. But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems, advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has popped. Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish it was more nuanced.

kulahan 11mo ago
LLMs are only valuable to me at the moment explicitly because ads are not part of the scene. Maybe for a while others will use it, but it will be on the exact same treadmill as anything else ad-based: you will become the product, any recommendations are worthless trash, and it is oriented to show as many ads as possible, rather than providing useful content. Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a natural fit, but a terrible one.

righthand 11mo ago

Any Llm generation tools are spam generation tools. AI-slop === Spam. How big is the market for spam again?

mentalgear 11mo ago
Unfortunately due to the generation / verification ratio, spam and misinformation are indeed their most low-hanging fruits. It's so much easier to generate LLM output than to verify it, which is probably why Google held back the Transformer Architecture.
kulahan 11mo ago
This isn't even remotely true. In its current iteration, it's one of the best jumping-off points for getting up to speed on the basics of a new topic.
- righthand 11mo ago
  So is spam if you only need a summarized version of the financial difficulties of princes in Nigeria. Or the kinds of people doctors can’t stand. Your jumping off point is a cliff into a pile of leaves. It looks correct and comfy but will hurt your butt taking it for granted. You’re telling people to jump and saying “it’ll get better eventually just keep jumping and ignore the pain!”
  - kulahan 11mo ago
    Nope, spam is specifically unwanted. Also, I'm saying "jump in the leaves, it's fun if you don't try leaping in from a mile up" and you're saying "NO LEAVES KILL PEOPLE ALL THE TIME" lol.
    - righthand 11mo ago
      What if I don’t want to use Llms, but people keep telling me that it’s fine and I should. Isn’t that spam? What if my reason isn’t, “I like typing code” but instead, “we don’t need more Googles doing Google things and abusing privacy.” Then personally the whole thing is spam. Regardless of what the reasons for and against Llms maybe doesn’t obfuscate that the primary use case for generated content has been to scam and spam people. That spam scam can be simply getting people to pour their personal private info into an Llm or it can be ads or a generated lie. Regardless it’s unwanted to a lot of people. And the history of that tech and attempt at normalizing it are founded in spam techniques. Even the gratuitous search for AGI is spammed on us as these companies take tax payer money and build out infrastructure that’s actually available to 0% of the public for use. Like I discredit in my mind anyone that cites Chatgpt as a source.

rpjt 11mo ago

I have no FOMO when it comes to Sora. None whatsoever. Authenticity is becoming more important day by day.

kbos87 11mo ago

I could see Sora having a significant negative impact on short form video products like TikTok if they don’t quickly and accurately find a way to categorize its use. A steady stream of AI generated video content hurts the value prop of short form video in more than one way… It quickly desensitizes you and takes the surprise out that drives consumption of a lot of content. It also of course leaves you feeling like you can’t trust anything you see.

kulahan 11mo ago
Do people on the dopamine drip really care how real their content is? Tons and tons of it is staged or modified anyways. I'm not sure there's anything Real™ on TikTok anyways.
- wobfan 11mo ago
  Thought the same. The human-generated content is just as brainless as the AI-generated slop. People who watched the first will also watch the latter. This will not change a lot, I think.
- bemmu 11mo ago
  I find Sora refreshing in that I don't have to worry about being tricked by something fake. It's just a fun multiplayer slopfest.
- duxup 11mo ago
  It certainly seems there are some who don't care. You always get the "who cares if it is fake" folks and even on reddit folks will point out something is AI and inevitably folks "who cares". But I'm not sure how many people that is or what kind of content they care or don't care about.
  - janwl 11mo ago
    I mean, it's entertainment content. It's like saying a movie is fake, they are actors playing roles. Of course. Who cares?

gdulli 11mo ago

> A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. But also, a company that earnestly believes that it's about to disrupt most labor is going to want to grab as many of those bucks as possible before people no longer have income.

xwowsersx 11mo ago

This take feels like classic Cal Newport pattern-matching: something looks vaguely "consumerish," so it must signal decline. It's a huge overreach. Whether OpenAI becomes a truly massive, world-defining company is an open question, but it's not going to be decided by Sora. Treating a research-facing video generator as if it's OpenAI's attempt at the next TikTok is just missing the forest for the trees. Sora isn't a product bet, it's a technology demo or a testbed for video and image modeling. They threw a basic interface on top so people could actually use it. If they shut that interface down tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing about the underlying progress in generative modeling. You can argue that OpenAI lacks focus, or that they waste energy on these experiments. That's a reasonable discussion. But calling it "the beginning of the end" because of one side project is just unserious. Tech companies at the frontier run hundreds of little prototypes like this... most get abandoned, and that's fine. The real question about OpenAI's future has nothing to do with Sora. It's whether large language and multimodal models eventually become a zero-margin commodity. If that happens, OpenAI's valuation problem isn't about branding or app strategy, it's about economics. Can they build a moat beyond "we have the biggest model"? Because that won't hold once opensource and fine-tuned domain models catch up. So sure, Sora might be a distraction. But pretending that a minor interface launch is some great unraveling of OpenAI's trajectory is just lazy narrative-hunting.

bossyTeacher 11mo ago
I agree. My bet is that OpenAI will not fullfill its mission of developing AGI by 2035. And I would be surprised if they ever did. As much as they might want to, there is only so many dreams you can whisper into rich people's ears before they tell you to go away. And without rich people's money, OpenAI will fall like a house of cards. The wealthy won't have infinite patience
impossiblefork 11mo ago
There are also interesting things one could do with models like Sora, depending how it actually performs in practice: prompting to segment, for example; and the thing could very possibly, if it's fast enough etc. become a foundation for robotics.
softwaredoug 11mo ago

ilickpoolalgae 11mo ago

> It’s unclear whether this app will last. One major issue is the back-end expense of producing these videos. For now, OpenAI requires a paid ChatGPT Plus account to generate your own content. At the $20 tier, you can pump out up to 50 low-resolution videos per month. For a whopping $200 a month, you can generate more videos at higher resolutions. None of this compares favorably to competitors like TikTok, which are exponentially cheaper to operate and can therefore not only remain truly free for all users, but actually pay their creators . fwiw, there's no requirement to have a subscription to create content.

draw_down 11mo ago
[dead]

sosodev 11mo ago

This article makes the claim that OpenAI, and AI in general, is massively overhyped because OpenAI is looking to sell slop. I'm not sure I can agree with that basic premise. Whether AGI does or does not materialize sometime soon doesn't matter. OpenAI, like every company who wants to raise massive amounts of money, needs to show huge growth numbers now. It seems like the unfortunate, simple truth is that slop is a growth hack.

micromacrofoot 11mo ago

OpenAI is steering significant amounts of traffic away from Google and ChatGPT is a fairly common name that extends beyond awareness of the company (or even what the word it means specifically). Not nearly on the level of "Kleenex" or "Google" as a term, but impressive given that other companies have spent decades trying to make a similar dent.

rchaud 11mo ago
So what though? At best they will stuff it with ads like Google has done and become what is basically Bing w/ Copilot. That isn't going to pay back the $500 billion or however much they're trying to raise.
- micromacrofoot 11mo ago
  it means I highly doubt it's the "beginning of the end" as postulated... unless it's a very very long end as another example: tesla has strung along a known overvaluation for a long time now and there's no end in sight despite a number of blunders

ath3nd 11mo ago

[dead]

FrustratedMonky 11mo ago

When you have this much money, you can afford to chase AGI, and assign a few people to make an app. The app might be frivolous, but it keep OpenAI in the public view. It's money well spent on marketing.

1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo ago

"It wasn't that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb, and many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he proclaimed* 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated* by LLM-based tools. A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn't be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also wouldn't be entertaining the idea, as Altman did last week, that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy"

freefaler 11mo ago
They might be forced to do so because the current inference pricing is not really covered by the 20$ monthly fee. Who knows what they have promised to the investors and the real cashflow is hard to be certain about with the circular nature of cross-investing between the biggest players.

bdcravens 11mo ago

More likely it's the beginning of the end for TikTok, since the amount of posts that use seems to be flooding the platform, lowering trust and credibility in each video.

fishmicrowaver 11mo ago
Hmm I have my doubts. I don't really understand the appeal of hyper-consumerism, brand focus, and big SM platform engagement. But I look over at my wife and she is clearly plugged in to a giant worldwide cultural movement of womens interests, product recommendations, and politics. It also appears to be the case that women are less likely to engage with AI. It's one of the big reasons I think it's a massive blunder to pursue AI erotica. I think a big part of the TikTok user base (women) will have to be persuaded to jump on the AI bandwagon and I'm not sure the industry is pursuing any products or features to woo that market.
- sandspar 11mo ago
  The subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI has 37,000 subscribers. And in the fantasy and science fiction section of big chain bookstores, 90% of the titles are porn for women. Women are absolutely the target market for text porn.

f33d5173 11mo ago

> wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos This isn't a money making venture for them, and you basically admitted as much. They poured no doubt massive amounts of money into developing this and have little hope of earning it back soon. This is an attempt to keep up with other ai companies also developing video models in order to not look behind to investors. Making it available to users is similarly about increasing active user counts in order to look more successful. If people incidentally get off to it that's not their concern

Nimitz14 11mo ago

Sora is about data gathering. This take is too simplistic.

softwaredoug 11mo ago

The counter argument is that OpenAI has to make fairly bolder moves. Social was _already_ becoming the domain of AI generated content. In the benign sense, there's been social content of people sharing their silly AI content since early DALL-e. Its a good idea to make a social app that's actually _about that_, because you can remix and play with the content in a novel way. The first Sora was sort of already going in this direction.

techblueberry 11mo ago

When fast take-off starts to be evident later next year, it’s the fact that OpenAI has built its hoard on a diverse set of product lines with a broad surface area to operate on that will be the differentiator allowing them to lead on the exponential before anyone else.

qustrolabe 11mo ago

That a funny title to give to OpenAI's side gig that went to top downloads in days

firemelt 11mo ago

SOMEONE POP IT PWEASEE

zduoduo 11mo ago

I don't think this is the case

erelong 11mo ago

I think some of the detractors or skeptics of AI developments like this are highly underestimating the value of these kinds of innovations like Sora, maybe because they are focusing on less productive uses of video generation (so they seem to call a lot of it "slop") I would think instead about educational or instructional videos: now instead of hunt for them online or producing them yourself somewhat "manually", you could just use AI technology to create them. That seems "massively" beneficial and useful. To dismiss these kinds of developments sounds akin to dismissing the development of the ability to write because "people will only use writing to make erotic fiction or jokes" (!). No one would say that. Or to developing cameras because people will "only take indecent or goofy pictures with them" (!). Maybe people are not making as much "useful" educational or instructional material, that's fair to say.