Why OpenAI really shut down Sora
Why OpenAI really shut down Sora
In Brief
Posted:
OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI video-generation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public raised immediate suspicions. The app had invited users to upload their own faces — so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new WSJ investigation, the real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that nobody was using, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI the AI race.
So what happened? After a splashy launch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was burning through roughly a million dollars a day — not because people loved it but because video generation is so costly to run. Every user who dropped themselves into a fantastical scene was drawing down a finite supply of AI chips.
While a whole team inside OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over the software engineers and enterprises that drive revenue. Claude Code, in particular, was eating OpenAI’s lunch.
So CEO Sam Altman made the call: kill Sora, free up compute, and refocus. If you want to understand just how sudden this was, consider what happened to Disney, per the WSJ: the entertainment giant had committed $1 billion to the partnership, yet found out Sora was being shut down less than an hour before the public. The deal died with it.
Newsletters
Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news
Related
Latest in AI
Commandité
Commandité
Commandité
Commandité
Annonces
Catégories
Lire la suite
Stripe’s valuation soars 74% to $159 billion In Brief Posted: 9:28 AM PST · February 24, 2026 Image Credits:Matthias Oesterle/Corbis / Getty Images Another year, another Stripe tender offer where investors buy shares from employees that values the company at an enormous step up. On Tuesday, Stripe announced that this latest secondary...
Nothing Teases 4A Phone: No Pink Option, but a Brand-New Glyph The British company gives a sneak preview of its new phone ahead of its March 5 launch. Alex Valdes from Bellevue, Washington has been pumping content into the Internet river for quite a while, including stints at MSNBC.com, MSN, Bing, MoneyTalksNews, Tipico and more. He admits to being somewhat fascinated by the...
Combine Training With Gold Making The most efficient OSRS gold methods also OSRS gold progress your account. Slayer trains combat while generating GP Fishing, Mining, and Woodcutting earn gold while leveling Avoid methods that make gold but stall overall progression Efficiency is highest when gold gain and account growth happen together. Minimize Downtime Small inefficiencies add up quickly...
Trump says Europeans should help secure the Strait of Hormuz. So far, they've refused European leaders are rejecting President Trump's demand they send military assets to the Middle East to help open the Strait of Hormuz, which is being obstructed by Iran.
Big Tech Promises to Pay for AI Data Center Power, but Who Will Enforce It? Why You Can Trust CNET Our expert, award-winning staff selects the products we cover and rigorously researches and tests our top picks. If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Reviews ethics statement Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and others signed a nonbinding pledge agreeing to cover the...
