[nerptastic]

I haven’t really been following this, but my understanding is that they’re cancelling this program - I haven’t dug into the “why” too much, seems like something about the Disney deal, “focusing on other initiatives”… My thought was that it’s because they’re not making money on it. Why else would they shut down a revenue stream? If it’s decent they don’t even need to improve it, it would be mostly passive income.

[a2128]

Other than money, a really good reason to shut down Sora is that it was a horrible idea in the first place that went completely against OpenAI's mission to make AI benefit humanity and improve lives. Sora was like TikTok, an app already thought to waste time and ruin attention spans, except even worse because there was no real information as everything inside is AI generated. More than that, it had a dual use as it allowed generating fake footage of protests etc that people then reuploaded to other platforms to mislead people. There is nothing about Sora I can think of that benefited humanity, it was only a net negative and a race to the bottom for more extreme memes and desensitizing people to reality.

[dwohnitmok]

There are many ways for a project to no longer be worth the company's attention. E.g. it might be the case that total costs factoring in on-going engineering energy and money (which is quite different than just compute costs!) are too much. It might be that political risk exposure from the product isn't worth the benefits it brings (Sora was always a lightning rod of criticism). It might be that the opportunity cost of engineering and/or compute resources spent on a product is too high (very different than absolute cost).

All this is to say, even for very compute cheap things, companies shut down "mostly passive income" revenue streams all the time (see e.g. Google's graveyard of products). There are all sorts of other organizational costs associated with ongoing maintenance of a product.