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Goodbye to Sora

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621–630 of 916 posts

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#621
post #561

RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech industry in my lifetime.

It's really funny how people can say these things online without giving them a second thought. There are literal weapons being produced that are killing people daily. But no, it's the meme generator that's evil.

violence at scale is often facilitated by and preceded by propaganda at scale, which is one of Sora’s only applications. Certain things are obvious to normal people, like “propaganda is real, powerful, bad, and historical of enormous significance”.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#622
post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because addicts pay up. I think it turns out they don't, not really anyway. And that's exactly why Sora is dead. They figured out that addictive AI slop has been so thoroughly commoditized that you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.

I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be. I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually worked. They got bored in like 2 days. It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't let my kids watch…

Yes, fortunately slop is pretty unwatchable after the novelty wears out. Even the lowest common denominator stuff NFLX churns out is in a different league.

I was talking to other people re: difference between code & other domains. Code is, for customer, what it does.. not how it does it. That is - we can get mad about style, idioms, frameworks, language, indentation, linting, verbosity, readability, maintainability but.. it doesn't really matter for the customer if the code does the thing its supposed to do.

Many things like entertainment products don't work that way. For a good book/movie/show, a good plot (the what) is table stakes. All of the how matters - dialogue, writing style, casting, camera/sound/lighting work, directing, pacing, sound track, editing, etc.

For short format low stakes stuff like online ads, then the AI slop actually probably works however.

Same for say making a power point. LLMs can quickly spit out a passable deck I am sure. For a lot of BS job use cases, that's actually probably fine. But if it is the key element of a sales pitch, really it's just advanced auto-formatting/complete, and the human element is still the most important part. For example I doubt all the AI startups are using AI generated sales pitches when they go to VC for funding.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#623
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where you can make money and have a really profitable business I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.

Afaik Anthropic still loses money for their main product in this space: Claude Code and their Max plans.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#624
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where you can make money and have a really profitable business I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.

Not really. They are burning money on hardware, resources and payroll without meaningful return prospects.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#625
post #447

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…

Multiple people have attested that Sam Altman is extremely charming (especially in more casual, intimate settings) and talks very nobly about his goals, but his actual work is just…all kinds of awful. And I think that charm only goes so far as it seems clear that people are starting to demand that OpenAI actually match its words with work it cannot produce. I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied…

He is a conman, and potentially a terrible person (look for it)

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#627
post #163

I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us. After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall…

Reminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a couple days then the novelty wore off.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#628
post #545

Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and…

> where you can make money and have a really profitable business I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.

Frontier model developers don't make money, but inference providers do. For open weight models there is a healthy market of inference providers that operate profitably without VC backing.

Re: Goodbye to Sora

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sora was a bit like seeing a new weapon being demoed. No matter how much engineering went in to it. The overwhelming feeling was “this is bad for society and the consequences will be massive.” So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.

Disagree. It's also used for high quality entertainment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lNzYP6SjVY

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Re: Goodbye to Sora

#630
post #163

I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us. After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall…

Yep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day.

There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for itself.

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