Move comes amid a reported plan to refocus on business and productivity use cases.
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OpenAI plans to shut down Sora just 15 months after its launch
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na when it comes down it'll be obvious in hindsight when they knew it was all going to collapse.
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Bet the mouse saw what was happening with the other video platform and had a few things they wanted in exchange for their billion dollars.
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This looks like a collapse of a company. It might hold out for few more months, maybe two years at most.
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I see. It'll be interesting to observe how "naughty mode" will be integrated into business and productivity applications.
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Musk does, because he thinks he's king of the nerds. Or is still at least pretending, who knows.
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Ahem, YouTube is interesting. Sora is the most boring social network ever, including the farmer dating site. Most huge accounts are lucky to get 1/10th of their followers liking a video, including Sora’s account. They never incentivized watching videos and only focused on creation. Consequently, they have no ads, no audience, and no reason for existing except as a YouTube/X accessory.
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You just named the inevitable guillotine these guys have got to eventually face. All the circular financial shenanigans, all the hyping future unicorns for all, it’s just the sound of feet desperately scrabbling to avoid the chop.
But the chop will come eventually, and it will have “cost” embossed on its blade.
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All jokes aside, Second Life was around long before FaceBook, or Chat GPT. It still manages somewhere around 30,000 daily users (which I am sure Horizon Worlds never did) and, unlike Altman and others, it actually turns a profit.
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lunatic_cringe
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Probably not enough uptake by the porn industry to generate the early profits needed to keep the project afloat. As we know from our shared history, if you follow where the porn is going, you will be led to a next big thing.
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After Windsurf’s coup de Trafalgar with their new price structure imposed last week, my company just realized the risks of heavy reliance on IA to code.
It had made us lazy, complacent and overconfident, until one morning we ran out of our daily quota after just one hour, and felt like we had just fallen into a highway bandits‘ trap, as we didn’t know our codebase intimately enough to work on it without IA.
I hate how this is turning software engineering to shit, while feeling the pressure to release slop at high velocity “because we can” (and so we must).
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That's exactly why Zuckface is such a tool for trying to take credit for SL in a round about Zuckonian way. When he first announced the metaverse everyone knew he was just trying to copy Second Life and one-up it. Thankfully he failed at that among other things:
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/24/tech/meta-new-mexico-trial-jury-deliberation
They really should put that slimeball in a room and throw away the room. Let the court cases continue and increase them from millions to billions in damages.
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Unless Altman showed the shareholders exactly how much money Sora was losing and that there was no path to profitability there.
Then he gets to avoid shareholder anger until they find out that's true for everything OpenAi does.
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There's what someone else in another forum I'm in wrote about it, and I couldn't possibly have said it better myself:
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Eh, that might be part of it but a bigger problem was just that Sora was a massive money sink in terms of compute with absolutely zero viable way to monetize it. By all accounts it was just a black hole sucking up cash. You can say that about LLMs in general but at least there are nods to monetization in other fields.
Sora as it existed was kind of a worst case software in that it was far far too expensive to run to really work as a novelty but far too terrible at any degree of coherency to be a real product.
Like even by AI techbro standards the outputs were genuinely really shit outside the "it's kind of wild this technology works at all" factor.
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Here's my two-part theory:
The past few months have likely been spent with engineers frantically trying to figure out if they could either meet the specifics of a licensing deal or remove all offending content. I believe this news indicates they could do neither.
Perhaps it will come back later with more IP-avoidance built in?
- Disney walked because OpenAI could not meet basic branding requirements for how their IP was represented (i.e. no Elsa smoking a cigarette).
- With the Disney deal gone, OpenAI now has no way to license themselves out of the lawsuits that Sora will surely generate. The software cannot be effectively scrubbed of IP so shutting it down is cheaper than getting sued.
The past few months have likely been spent with engineers frantically trying to figure out if they could either meet the specifics of a licensing deal or remove all offending content. I believe this news indicates they could do neither.
Perhaps it will come back later with more IP-avoidance built in?
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Meta's definition required the metaverse to be imminent without already existing.
It can't just be an MMO etc because those already exist and an investor can quantify how much they can make. WoW has made a lot of money but it's also made a measurable amount of money. So an investor can conclude if you spend $80B to make a wildly successful MMO you probably still lost $60-70B.
Simultaneously that metaverse can't be so far in the future that a few billion dollars won't get us there, right? ...right?
So it must be bigger than anything that already exists, far enough away that it won't happen without investment, but close enough that people will see returns within a few years.
As an aside I briefly worked with a guy who made more than his software job paid by developing content for Second Life. He was unable to tell me exactly what he made at work (a rare bit of professionalism from him). But I gathered that his work went somewhere down the kink rabbit hole such that individuals would pay him thousands for bespoke content. He wasn't making stuff for mass consumption, he was working for clients with specific needs.
I think it's better I never found out what he made.
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This pretty much sums up the qualities of an idea to be able to grift venture capital
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The one and only product I never used or even tried as they threatened from the beginning that this was "social media". The "humans + AI = deepfake harassment simulator" association was too deep. Although I only ever heard on the news that X with Grok turned into exactly what I had anticipated for the social media app that Sora was - I applaud any and all of that to be gone.
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When I for a little while worked in a large-ish VC-owned tech company one of the things that struck me was that the C-suiters there seemed to all have these weird one-liners that they would endlessly repeat, like a mantra. I suspect they were so far removed from the actual products and work that all they had were these shallow concepts that they saw as philosophies to guide their strategies. The CPO kept saying “it’s the tiktok generation, nobody has the attention span for more than five seconds anymore!”. Unfortunately there was little to no substance beyond that. I didn’t stay long.
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Open source competition too. Wan 2.2, then ltx 2.3.
Sure lower quality. But with control / driving video / images, its on par or even better with offerings from closed source companies.
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Exactly. My hope is that phrase accurately describes both nascent (valuable) technologies just as well as snake oil.
The true grift of Silicon Valley is that they've built a hype-based system where potential investors cannot tell the difference between the two. Maybe this is the next big thing and the fact that you don't understand it just means you're old and out of touch! Or it might have fundamental problems like physics and you could throw capital B Billions at it and only see losses.
The true Silicon Valley mogul can take billions, squander it aimlessly, and turn around and say, "Well the problem, actually, is that you didn't give me enough," with a straight face.
It's not that venture capital doesn't attempt to do due-diligence, it's just that the nature of emerging technologies means that a founder can show you a slide deck that makes the case that....actually all your prior data doesn't matter! The ceiling is limitless because this is an untapped market so of course your research only shows modest returns! Theoretical returns are infinite.
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Given that this is an OpenAI representative, there’s a fair chance that ChatGPT may have been involved in crafting that statement.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Also unarguably on the contestant short-list for "most despicable human alive" (altman and musk are on the list, too, so if we're lucky a battle to the death — at least two will be gone in that scenario, which I can accept as a win).
Funny thing about some of these valley tech-douches like Thiel... going around trying to warn people about the anti-christ... look at what zuckerborg has done and what altman is trying to do... and then recognizing he is one of Thiel's own creations (mentored for years)... the fucking irony. If i were a religious person looking for end-times signs, altman and zuck are exactly the kind of people I would be looking at as anti-christ candidates.
Given the preponderance of evidence and even imagery, I challenge anyone to find evidence of a soul or real humanity.... he's just so sorry for what he's done... can't you tell??
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The suddenness and completeness of this reeks of cover up. I expect a report in a month or two how it was generating kiddie porn featuring Micky Mouse. While they rush to IPO before it comes out.
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