Why OpenAI killed Sora
It's about GPUs. Also: CPUs are back, Meta's big stock awards, a CEO actually not blaming AI for layoffs, and more.
I spent today hopping between ARM’s big event and OpenAI HQ in SF. More on some of that below.
Hollywood spent the past six months agonizing over what Sora meant for the entertainment industry. Turns out it was just a side quest.
The Sora app is dead, along with its API, its planned integration into ChatGPT, and the $1 billion Disney partnership that was supposed to let people wield lightsabers with Luke Skywalker in AI-generated clips. The Disney deal was a handshake one and is now no more. The Sora team will pivot to world-simulation research for longer-term robotics work.
This is how fast things move at OpenAI: The company published a blog post updating Sora’s content policies yesterday. When Fidji Simo joined ACCESS just seven weeks ago, she talked at length about Sora and hinted at bringing its video generation to ChatGPT. Despite how the early hype around it had fizzled, she said Sora was “really nailing creation,” and that the company was “excited about what we’re seeing.”
While the outside world speculates about motivations, the reality is that OpenAI is making trade-offs in how it allocates compute across research, product launches, and inference. Video generation is extraordinarily GPU-intensive, and every chip powering Sora clips was one not powering what OpenAI is focusing on right now: Codex and its enterprise products. OpenAI employees are under tremendous pressure to catch up with Anthropic on coding around productizing it in a way that’s accessible to non-engineers, like Claude Cowork has done.
The broader picture is OpenAI’s new super-app strategy. ChatGPT, Codex, and the Atlas browser are being merged into a single desktop application to better compete with what Anthropic is cooking and enable agents at scale. It’s hard to see how Sora fits into that strategy, especially when OpenAI has already hit many brick walls in pursuing potential content deals for it. Simply put: the GPUs are better used elsewhere.
Sam Altman also laid out a reorg today. He’s moving safety under Mark Chen’s research org and security under Greg Brockman’s scaling org, freeing himself up to focus more on fundraising and building data centers. Simo is now the CEO of “AGI Deployment,” or essentially everything else. Altman said OpenAI has finished pretraining its next model, codenamed Spud, which he expects to produce a “very strong model” in a few weeks that the team believes “can really accelerate the economy.”
