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Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

calnewport.com

121–130 of 207 posts

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#121

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…

> 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.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#122

"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'…

AGI is like L5 automated driving - academic concepts that have no bearing on the ability of these technologies to transform the economy.

And no bearing on the ability of these technologies to thoroughly screw us.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is all true, what's the most optimistic view you can take looking ~20 years out? How could all of this wind up leading to a much more fair, kind, sustainable and prosperous future? Acknowledging risks is important, but where do YOU want all this to go?

As adults already, we grew up with things that are either not relevant or give us the wrong responses to our heuristics. But the kids who grow up with this stuff will just integrate into their life and proceed. The society which results from that will be something we cannot predict as it will be alien to us. Whether it will be better or not -- probably not. Humans evolved to spend most of their time with a small grou…

I don't disagree with any points you made, but I do find it interesting you refused a prompt to imagine a better future, articulate your wants, and practice optimism. That's your choice, but a telling one.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#124

> 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…

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Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger concern given that: For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly) We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything tha…

Absolutely! And don’t kid yourself into thinking you are immune from this either. You can find support of basically anything you want to believe. And your friendly LLM will be more than happy to confirm it too! Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth even means. Is there even such a thing?

> Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth even means. Is there even such a thing?

Truth absolutely is a thing. But sometimes, it's nuanced, and people don't like nuance. They want something they can say in a 280-character tweet that they can use to "destroy" someone online.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#126
post #48

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.

Just yesterday I saw a Sora-generated video that purported to be someone filming a failed HIMARS missile failing and falling on stopped traffic and exploding on the 5 in Camp Pendleton on Saturday. (IRL they were doing some kind of live-fire drill and it did actually involve projectiles flying over the freeway.) While there were some debris instances IRL the freeway was completely shut down per the governors orders a…

> I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.

Curious what you used. I have an RTX 5090 and I've tried using some local video generators and the results are absolute garbage unless I'm asking for something extremely simple and uncreative like "woman dancing in a field".

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#127
post #105

"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'…

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?

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.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As adults already, we grew up with things that are either not relevant or give us the wrong responses to our heuristics. But the kids who grow up with this stuff will just integrate into their life and proceed. The society which results from that will be something we cannot predict as it will be alien to us. Whether it will be better or not -- probably not. Humans evolved to spend most of their time with a small grou…

I don't disagree with any points you made, but I do find it interesting you refused a prompt to imagine a better future, articulate your wants, and practice optimism. That's your choice, but a telling one.

It's really hard to imagine how "truth is harder to find, more people lie with impunity, and convince others that their lies are true" could have a positive outcome.

Moreover, I think it's really hard overall to imagine a better future as long as all of this technology and power is in the hands of massively wealthy people who have shown their willingness to abuse it to maintain that wealth at our expense.

The optimistic future effectively requires some means of reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest of us.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

"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, Canv…

My experience suffering with JIRA daily is that the AI is useless and fairly easy to ignore. If it were actually helpful, I could imagine using it more, and the costs would increase proportionately.

Re: Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 definit…

> 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.

>Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships still look at porn.

How do you know those relationships are "sexually fulfilling"?

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