OpenAI’s Sora is headed to that great data center in the sky 

“We’re saying goodbye to Sora. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing,” a post from the Sora on X, the Everything app, reads. “We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.”

To be clear, what people made with Sora absolutely did not matter, particularly the videos of school shootings, sexual violence, and celebrity deepfakes that have made the modern internet such a joy. These types of videos weren’t a particularly good look for OpenAI, especially as it faces litigation over ChatGPT advising a teen’s suicide. 

It really didn’t take long for OpenAI to kill the project, considering Sora wasn’t even popular within the company because workers believed it required too much computing power. Even without legs, the Metaverse lasted longer than Sora. Launched only a few months ago, Sora entered the world in a whirlwind of legal threats and deal-making. As they are prone to do, most of Hollywood saw a sloppy video of Altman shoplifting at Target and immediately thought, “Well, we’re cooked.” Disney was first to ink a $1 billion deal for an undisclosed stake in OpenAI as a means of working with the company before OpenAI began publishing videos of Stitch using the R-word. They were set to license more than 200 characters to OpenAI before the company could simply steal them, as other AI companies had already been doing. However, due to Sora’s sunsetting, Disney is exiting its deal as well, per THR, leaving OpenAI without a video app ahead of its anticipated initial public offering. Maybe they should’ve generated some episodes of Love Island starring fruit. Those videos use Disney character designs and don’t even have to pay for them. It’s quite a deal.