OpenAI’s Sora video app launched last September. In no time, users started sharing generative slops, all of Dragon Ball Z has Spongebob. It’s stopping and a new one Wall Street Journal the report reveals why. This was losing active users and costing the company a fortune. Apparently $1 million a day, to be precise.
According to THE Wall Street Journalthe platform peaked at 1 million daily users before eventually dropping to less than 500,000. Still making CEO Sam Altman videos grill Pikachu And Studio Ghibli-fiing other copyrighted IP was not cheap. “Sora was losing about $1 million a day, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the report reads.
The AI-generated video-sharing platform was intended to help OpenAI win over customers and convince a general public that is quickly becoming hostile toward LLMs that slop could be fun and cool. Disney was so on board he agreed to pay the company $1 billion for services to help Mickey board Altman’s AI express.
Outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger told investors in February that Sora-directed videos would be part of a new short-form video offering on the Disney+ streaming service. There were even plans for special versions of the tools to be licensed to the company so that Disney executives could create their own live-action remakes and God knows what else.
So it’s very funny that Disney apparently had no idea that OpenAI was about to pull the plug on its whole AI video thing until just an hour before the move was announced. Disney is scrambling to find new AI partners, and the Altman Waste Plant is instead betting on robotics for its eventual payday.