The Real Reason OpenAI Shut Sora Down Is a Warning to Every AI Startup

OpenAI Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you! OpenAI unceremoniously killed off its text-to-video AI app Sora last month, bringing an abrupt end to months of brain-melting AI slop. Even what was supposed to be a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney was caught in the crossfire. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, it wasn’t the massive bills or the legal liabilities arising from rampant copyright infringement that inspired it to kill the app. Instead, the company was desperately looking to free up computing resources to power its coding and enterprise products based on its upcoming AI model, code-named Spud. To executives’ frustration, compute remains a finite resource and infamously hard to come by, despite the industry pouring billions of dollars worth of borrowed cash into buildouts of enormous data centers. That should serve as a warning to every startup in the space, large or small: not attracting users is a problem, but if they show up in droves, it’s going to be a bottleneck and potential financial disaster. According to the WSJ, Sora “now looks like an expensive strategic miscalculation” in hindsight, a bitter lesson learned and a dire warning to AI startups everywhere not get bogged down by “distracting side quests,” as OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, told employees in a memo earlier this year. It also goes to show how quickly the tides can change in a ch...