Que Sora, Sora

What OpenAI dumping its video generator means &, more important, what it doesn’t mean

In the end, it’s ended with a whimper, not a bang. “We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” OpenAI posted on X yesterday. Not as surprising as the Feb 28 attack on Iran, this was still a pretty surprising development. Because of how many hymns to this OpenAI video generator, Sam Altman’s sung. No explanation was provided for the decision. So, naturally, explanations have multiplied. Bubble bubbling, some analysed, right off the bat. US private sector is forecast to spend $700bn on AI, in 2026 alone. This ‘AI bubble’ conversation isn’t really about whether AI matters – it clearly does. But about whether the financial frenzy is running ahead of reality. 

Except, recent months have seen both OpenAI and Anthropic release new enterprise platforms, which have activated new productivities, and a revenue surge. Between these two frontier labs, Anthropic has never bothered with video generation. Or even image and sound generation. Plus, since Dario Amodei  spiritedly took on Pentagon, while Altman folded, Anthropic’s smartphone app downloads have raced past OpenAI’s. Dumping Sora makes sense in this context. It’s a compute guzzler, electricity glutton, enormously expensive. OpenAI seems to be looking to have more streamlined operations, like Anthropic. 

The most romantic explanation of the Sora drawdown, is that OpenAI has seen the daylight on copyright. But this could be making a virtue out of OpenAI’s necessity. Sora’s performance has lagged other video generators. China’s Bytedance wasted no time responding to its closure, by laying out the welcome mat at its Seedance platform: “For creators who just lost their primary video tool with zero notice, the door is open.” Yes, legal threats from Hollywood studios now have Seedance heavily constricted. But the deepfake war is very much on. There should be no complacency on this front. The whole saga of Netanyahu struggling to prove that he’s alive, while doubts persisted about the video proof of this, is an indicator of the worsening environment of doubt. 

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