OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated he discontinued the Sora video app to avoid developing engagement features that could have made it commercially viable. Altman’s remarks came during an interview on the Mostly Human podcast, marking his first since Sora’s abrupt closure.
OpenAI announced the discontinuation of Sora on March 24, 2024. The decision effectively terminated a $1 billion deal with Walt Disney Co., which was announced in December 2023 and would have allowed Sora users access to over 200 Disney franchises, including Marvel and Star Wars. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, Disney was informed of Sora’s shutdown less than an hour before it became public.
Altman provided a different perspective on the situation than the primarily financial narrative, stating that Sora was incurring losses of approximately $1 million per day and that its user base had decreased from about one million to fewer than 500,000. He emphasized that he would not engage in building addictive design elements.
This reluctance to create addictive features coincided with a recent jury verdict in Los Angeles that found Meta and YouTube liable for harm caused by their platforms. The jury awarded $6 million in damages, citing the companies’ design practices as harmful.
During the interview, Altman confirmed that OpenAI declined an internal proposal to integrate Sora’s capabilities into ChatGPT. He indicated that the closure of Sora is part of a broader strategic pivot within the company, refocusing resources toward coding tools and enterprise customers.
Sora will be taken offline on April 26, 2024, with the developer API scheduled to shut down on September 24, 2024. OpenAI plans to redirect the resources previously allocated to Sora’s development toward world simulation models for advancing robotics.
