OpenAI’s decision last week Shutting down its AI video-generation tool Sora just six months after releasing it to the public attracted immediate skepticism. The app invited users to upload their faces – so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new WSJ InvestigationThe real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that no one was using, and keeping it alive was causing OpenAI to lose the AI race.
So what? After the spectacular launch, Sora’s number of worldwide users reached nearly one million and then dropped to less than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was costing nearly a million dollars a day — not because people liked it, but because running video generation is exceptionally expensive. Each user who inserted themselves into a hypothetical chase scene was drawing a limited supply of AI chips.
While an entire team inside OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over software engineers and revenue-boosting enterprises. Cloud code, in particular, was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
So Altman made the call: kill Sora, free the Count, and refocus. If you want to understand how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney, according to the WSJ: The entertainment giant promised $1 billion for the partnership, yet less than an hour before the public announcement it was revealed that Sora was being shut down. With this the deal ended.
