OpenAI will soon shut down its Sora AI video generation app, the company said in a surprising announcement Tuesday.
“We’re saying goodbye to Sora,” the company wrote in a post on X. “We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.”
The closure of the resource-intensive AI app comes ahead of an expected initial public stock offering from OpenAI in the coming months.
OpenAI has recently come under intense pressure from rival AI company Anthropic, whose AI systems have soared in popularity amongst leading businesses and software engineers. Anthropic, with its flagship Claude family of AI models, has eschewed products like image and video generation to instead focus scarce computational resources on text and code generation.
OpenAI’s unveiling of Sora in 2024 rattled many in the entertainment industry, who quickly expressed concerns that the model’s ability to easily and quickly generate relatively high-quality video from text would displace human creators.
In October, OpenAI debuted a second-generation Sora model that created even higher quality videos with audio capabilities and more accurate physics, which led to even more intense blowback and concern from Hollywood.
OpenAI paired the new model’s launch with a standalone app, which was simply called Sora. The app quickly became the most-downloaded in the iOS App Store’s Photo and Video category within a day of its release, with many users creating lifelike videos of popular characters such as Lara Croft, Mario and Pikachu. But the videos raised alarm bells from copyright and deepfake experts.
In December, the Walt Disney Co. surprised Hollywood after announcing that it had reached a three-year deal with OpenAI to bring many of its popular characters to Sora’s artificial intelligence video generator. Disney also said it planned to make a $1 billion investment in OpenAI as part of the agreement.
Disney pledged to become a “major customer” of OpenAI, using its services to develop new products and experiences, including for its Disney+ streaming service.
In wake of Tuesday’s news, Disney’s deal with OpenAI is not proceeding, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Disney “respect[s] OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a spokesperson for the entertainment giant said.
“We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”
In recent weeks, top OpenAI executives have said that they are sharpening the company’s focus, recognizing that it cannot do “everything at once,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news.
Shortly after the Sora app launched in October, OpenAI’s head of Sora, Bill Peebles, announced limits on the number of videos users could generate due to the limited supply of computer chips available to power the video-generation model.
By shifting computing resources away from Sora, OpenAI could reallocate the computing chips to more lucrative coding, reasoning or text-generation tasks.
Just weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it had raised $110 billion in fresh funding, vaulting the company’s total value to about $730 billion.
