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.
Goodbye to Sora
21–30 of 916 posts
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#22> 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?
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#23"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
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Re: Goodbye to Sora
#24Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago? https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
Wow. OpenAI is the weirdest company in the planet. I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.
You have more info about the inflated token use? I’m using codex cli a bunch now, but the reported token usage seems like an order of magnitude higher than, say Claude code with opus.
Idk if it’s because I set codex to xhigh reasoning, but even then it still seems way higher than Claude. The input/output ratio feels large too, eg I have codex session which says ~500M in / ~2M out.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#25This 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.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. OpenAI is the weirdest company in the planet. I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.
They are just cancelling side projects because Anthropic is dominating in enterprise and side projects (probably) don't make profit. https://x.com/ShanuMathew93/status/2031074311629353299
This data is pretty questionable. OpenAI employees have said on Twitter that it does not account for ChatGPT Enterprise, where most of their growth is, which is quote-only and not paid by credit card.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#27This 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, got…
I'm bullish on video generation technology, but honestly not on OpenAI or any Western company's deployment of it. I think they'll all mostly suffer from the same problems that Sora did.
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#28I 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..
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#29Are we sure it was in that order?
Re: Goodbye to Sora
#30This 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, got…
Yeah, their forth place video model does not go away, but they didn't ink a billion dollar with Disney that's just gone up in flames because they "weren't serious"
This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.