The Sudden Fall of OpenAI's Most Hyped Product Since ChatGPT(www.wsj.com)
24 pointsby fortran773 hours ago11 comments
  • _doctor_lovean hour ago
    It makes total sense to me that this would happen. The economics around Sora and video generation in general are just not there right now, and if you're a company that's also doing research into these things, that's basically a bottomless pit for money. I think OpenAI ceding the space to Google and others for the moment is probably the smart move.

    I had fun using Sora and I'm bummed to see it will get removed from the API as well later this year, but no biggie. Veo is plenty good.

    It really must cost so much money to generate these videos. That they can generate 12 second videos that are high quality in such a short amount of time - that takes some serious horsepower.

    • btown26 minutes ago
      If anything, Sora was an experimental question: giving away video generation is expensive, but is the voluntary user labeling and engagement data, which can be fed into RLHF, accretive enough to model training that it's a meaningful trade to make?

      The shutdown of the service makes it clear that the answer was "no."

      (It's not a particularly useful signal, though, in evaluating OpenAI's future. It could mean that OpenAI is less interested in video data, which might have implications on their AGI ambitions. It could equally mean that OpenAI has enough data that it's hit diminishing returns, or has found a cheaper source of labeling, or doesn't consider it meaningful one way or another. So there's a lot of thoughtpieces that the shutdown is a sign of weakness, but I don't think it's worth jumping to conclusions.)

  • ting019 minutes ago
    They're just removing it from public access and selling it to big money instead. Think large advertising companies, government agencies, Coke-Cola, Hollywood, etc. The scary part is now that they've removed it publicly, it's going to be harder to keep a pulse on what is real and what is fake. We can't trust any video, audio or text content now.
  • adjejmxbdjdnan hour ago
    Was ChatGPT hyped?

    It took off rapidly but that was hardly because of any hyping and almost entirely due to word of mouth and people actually liking the product, until the press picked up on it.

    From what I remember they still had an invite process when they were getting popular and the demand clearly overwhelmed their servers several times, indicating a much bigger response than they expected. If anything I think OpenAI was downplaying the product at the time.

    • lmm37 minutes ago
      > It took off rapidly but that was hardly because of any hyping and almost entirely due to word of mouth and people actually liking the product, until the press picked up on it.

      Not my experience. A whole lot of breathless mentions in media, LinkedIn, and especially top-down company emails. Far fewer cases of people actually liking/using it.

    • heavyset_go25 minutes ago
      It was claimed that ChatGPT was sentient and AGI lol

      Some people lost their minds over the popular sentiment: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

    • ares623an hour ago
      Yes, that is what hype is. It was organic hype, and is frankly the only real way to do it otherwise you get backlash.
      • svntan hour ago
        Those products aren’t typically described as having been “hyped” though — just successful or viral. Hyped has a sort of derogatory/schadenfreude subtext.
      • HeWhoLurksLatean hour ago
        I thought "hype" was a different thing from "organic growth" but similar
  • 2 hours ago
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  • tbreschian hour ago
    What is the fallout if OpenAI goes under?
    • superfrank10 minutes ago
      I'm not an expert, but I can't see how they truly go under in the way Enron or Theranos did. If they did hit massive financial trouble the issue wouldn't be that their technology was bad, it would just be that they didn't have enough runway to get to a point where they could make the tech profitable. Someone with deep pockets would step in an buy them up before they went to 0 under the belief that they could last long enough to make the math work. Microsoft has a huge vested interest in keeping them solvent since they own so much of it already. Amazon clearly wants in after this last round of funding. I also wouldn't be surprised if Musk tried to buy it given that xAI seems like a bit of a shit show and I can't think of a better way for him to assert dominance over Altman than to take a company that Altman almost bankrupted and make it successful.
    • kev009an hour ago
      Eventually a new era of maturity and cost discipline.
    • yaloginan hour ago
      First thing that comes to mind is musk will be absolutely insufferable and childish about it. A lot of companies will be impacted but it’s not going to happen. They are cleaning up their messes to go public
    • MengerSpongean hour ago
      A systemic risk to the financial sector due to their overexposure to CDOs? Yes, I know that's the same plot as 2008. The writers have gotten lazy.
      • zitterbewegungan hour ago
        Replace financial sector with big tech and overexposure to CDOs to overexposure to large promised data centers build outs and you have the right answer.
  • nclin_2 hours ago
    Meanwhile, Sora and other video models have become available on Openrouter. Are we sure this is the end of Sora? Or just the interface?
    • throwaway314155an hour ago
      They’re slowly deprecating and ending the Sora API over the next 6 months.
  • wontopos2 hours ago
    The hype cycle for AI products is brutal. Going from "this will change everything" to silence in a few months is rough. Makes you wonder how many other AI products are riding the same wave right now without anyone noticing.
  • cmiles82 hours ago
    The whole company appears to be a giant pile of burning cash at this point and I can only imagine that this wasn’t exactly helping that situation.

    Was it fun while it lasted? Sorta, but it got old pretty quick.

    Is this a business? Hell no.

    • anonym00se12 hours ago
      Just wait until Sir Jony Ive's unapologetically AI hardware products that cost too much, do too little, and also flop.
      • cmiles8an hour ago
        One would have to think he’s having second thoughts. Attaching himself to a sinking ship would torpedo his legacy.
        • danpalmeran hour ago
          I doubt that comes into it. Ive wants to design what he wants to design, whether people like that universally or not is clearly not a concern to him. Everyone hated the MacBook keyboards for years, the lack of ports, the iPhone not getting USB-C until a decade late, whatever the Magic Mouse is, etc. Ive is just ungrounded from what people want, 20% of the time he knows better and changes the industry, 80% of the time it just annoys people.
      • ares623an hour ago
        Whatever happened to that one? I suspect they made the video and announcement for the PR and didn't actually have a plan. Then the Friend AI and Meta glasses thing came out and I suspect Sir Ive is having some serious second thoughts in putting his brand onto anything like that.

        It seems no one wants a dedicated AI hardware product. Because the smartphone exists.

  • Insanity2 hours ago
    Honestly given that they’re nowhere near profitable even with their main product this is the right move.
  • minsung08302 hours ago
    It's really disappointing news. I've been actively using Sora for my video production
    • Barbing2 hours ago
      Was it your first time doing video production? (or maybe you had done solo or larger projects before)
    • byzantinegenean hour ago
      even more reason to cheer for the rest of us
    • platevoltagean hour ago
      Well then this is great news.
    • gnabgib2 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • sgc2 hours ago
        Unbelievable. Some dude makes an hn account after lurking who knows how long, makes his very first innocuous comment a day later, and is immediately attacked as a newb or a shill? Give people at least a little benefit of the doubt.
        • abcde6667772 hours ago
          "Prior to possession of a hacker news account, a man existeth not" Ancient Chinese proverb
        • gnabgib2 hours ago
          None of those things were said, you're reading a lot into a 1 day old account commenting on a 5 day old story.
          • 39 minutes ago
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