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Goodbye to Sora

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Re: Goodbye to Sora

#451

Post by waterproof »

username223 wrote: post #440
AussieWog93 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person. I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives. He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease t…

Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt ). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.

> the things he does.

The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#452

Post by claaams »

ionwake wrote: post #343

Man I find the HN crowd so cross and fickle sometimes. I think it’s just because when companies get bad rep it affects how people view the products? Im autistic and tend to focus on the tech SORA ( whatever that means) was one of the most astounding demos I’ve probably ever seen ( ChatGPT was more gradual ). The shock and awe of rendered AI video blew my mind. Yes months later everyone can do it and is bored by it an…

The tech was fine/interesting for what it is. The product itself is awful and something from nightmares. It's not an enjoyable experience for me watching some uncanny valley slop. I'm not impressed with the "creativity" of someone typing in a prompt and having a plagiarismbox spit something out. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of someone actually making something is what I like. The emotion and reasons behind a work of art make it inspiring. The details of their perspective and choices they make when creating it are beautiful and interesting.

The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars on this when that money would have been better served going to the creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#453

Post by SXX »

qnleigh wrote: post #292
wholinator2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing dishes/groceries.

I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go deeper.

You can alao use NotebookLM's as source for Gemini app and ask it to do more in-depth summaries with custom prompting.

This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#454

Post by tabs_or_spaces »

I think Sora was technically impressive as a concept. The way it was managed as a product wasn't good.

There didn't seem to be any marketing for it. Like I can't even remember an ad for it or any content creator type of person pushing Sora actively.

To get access to Sora I believe you needed to be on a paid plan?

It's really difficult to get user generated content going when it's behind a paywall.

It's also hard to tell if this means that openai is in trouble, or if this is just a badly managed product that deserved to be killed. With the negative sentiment on openai, folks might think the former.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#455

Post by systemsweird »

I suspect the issue was Sora likely had a very low ratio of consumers to creators which makes a route to monetization unlikely. There was no incentives for doom scrolling consumers to migrate to Sora when they were already getting plenty of short form videos on FB, IG, and TikTok.

The network effects of the other two platforms are too strong, and a value prop of “watch similar videos but they’re all AI” is not strong for consumers.

Also, say what you want about AI slop, but I was on sora a lot for a few weeks and there was a real explosion of creativity on there. It felt new and exciting and creators were engaging with each other and sharing feedback and tips. I generated a ton of videos and surprised myself with a flury of creative ideas.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#456

Post by nomel »

ronsor wrote: post #20
hexage1814 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like. The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded th…

Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for. Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.

> Local-first is definitely the way.

i think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a datacenter.

this has been the case for a long while now, and will increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#457

Post by Shank »

SecretDreams wrote: post #277
small_model wrote: post #158

Not good, seems like they are running out of cash and partners abandoning them. They had no real moat to be fair. Anthropic eating their lunch in enterprise and other players have cashflows from other businesses (XAI, Google)

> XAI Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

> Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government agencies?

xAI doesn't have "content moderation" around adult content, so that usage is quite popular.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#458

Post by utopiah »

wolvoleo wrote: post #347
skwirl wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in 2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.

I liken it to VR. That was a big hype before AI and while I really love the tech (I have 5 headsets) I could have told anyone that the expectations were insane. The investors truly believed that in 2-3 years time everyone would be doing everything with a big headset on. It was dragged into lots of situations where it didn't belong. Then of course the hype collapsed and now even the usecases where VR shines are deemed…

Ugh... a balanced take, this isn't appropriate for social media! /s

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#460

Post by nomel »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #379
nomel wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having trouble understanding this. There were some very funny videos, created by people with a great sense of humor, and I happen to enjoy laughing, and I don't feel bad about that. I always saw it as the Vine of AI. For a litmus test of your perspective, try using sora. Try to make a video that makes someone genuinely laugh. Sora doesn't prompt itself. Human creativity and humor is still required. Sure, it was m…

that's just empty consumption, there's nothing that makes art great in algorithmically generated content except at the shallowest of levels. I mean no disrespect, but that is extremely sad and all too indicative of the instrumental reasoning of the industrial milieu. It's about 2 steps above marrying a sex doll.

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