OpenAI announced this week that it’s shutting down its Sora app and related video models just six months after launching the app.
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated what the decision means for OpenAI and for the industry more broadly. To some extent, the move seems consistent with what we’ve been hearing about OpenAI as it focuses on enterprise and productivity tools ahead of a possible IPO.
In fact, Kirsten suggested that OpenAI’s decision to shutter Sora was “a sign of maturity that was nice to see in an AI lab.”
But Sora’s shutdown — along with ByteDance’s reported delay in launching its Seedance 2.0 video model worldwide — could also be a reality check moment for the makers of AI video tools, and for evangelists who claim these tools will be replacing Hollywood anytime soon.
Read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Anthony: I think it’s worth highlighting that it’s not just the app. I mean, the app was particularly unappealing to me, at least, and I think to other people, because it was this idea of a social network without people, where it’s just nothing but slop.
But beyond the app, it seems like OpenAI is basically winding down pretty much everything it’s doing with video. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke some of this news, it’s really about this idea that Open AI is — in advance of potentially going public — really trying to focus on business products, enterprise products, programming products. [So] this consumer social app, [and] more broadly video, is not a priority right now.
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Sean: Yeah, I never really used [the app]. The idea of it turned me off for a number of different reasons. And you know, it was a good reminder that Open AI — and I don’t mean this to knock them down in really any way — but I think this was a reminder, probably, for them internally, of the element of luck […] in how successful ChatGPT became.
Clearly, there is something that is valuable there to people, I don’t want to take away from that, because you do not get to the usage numbers that we’ve heard reported from them without there …