OpenAI surprisingly discontinues video AI Sora

OpenAI is surprisingly discontinuing its AI video generator Sora, just five months after the latest version was launched with great fanfare. The AI company announced this on the microblogging service X, after The Wall Street Journal had reported on the move. The reason for the drastic step is reportedly OpenAI's attempt to focus on its core business. It will also no longer be possible to generate videos with ChatGPT in the future. Furthermore, this also ends an agreement with media company Disney, which had licensed more than 200 characters for use in Sora in December and wanted to invest one billion US dollars in OpenAI.

A surprising end

Sora was first introduced in February 2024, and the current and significantly improved second version was released at the end of September. The AI technology can produce video clips lasting several seconds upon instruction; with Sora 2, they were supposed to be much more consistent than with its predecessor. Additionally, the new version could generate videos with synchronized dialogues, sound effects, and background noise. OpenAI also released its app for this, through which the generated content could be shared. Just two weeks ago, OpenAI announced that Sora would be integrated into ChatGPT. This has now been cancelled.

According to Reuters, the shift away from Sora was extremely surprising even internally. As late as Monday, a team from OpenAI was working with Disney on a Sora project, and a few minutes later, the partners learned of the impending end. According to anonymous sources of the news agency, Sora not only consumed a lot of resources, but the video generator even caused other teams within the company to be insufficiently equipped. Nevertheless, the step was completely surprising; just on Tuesday, OpenAI published an article on its blog about safety measures for Sora, without mentioning the impending end at all.

OpenAI has not publicly commented on the reasons for the end of the video generator, although the technology has repeatedly faced criticism. According to The Wall Street Journal, the responsible team will focus on robotics in the future. Recently, there has been increasing talk that the AI company is feeling the pressure from competitors like Anthropic and Google more and more. Last week, it became public that Sam Altman's AI company intends to merge its products and is planning a “super app” for the desktop. This would reportedly provide access to ChatGPT, the Atlas browser, and the Codex coding platform. Whether this will happen is unclear given the unexpected departure from Sora. OpenAI wants to go public by the end of the year and needs a functioning core business for that.

(mho)