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…
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.