cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253
This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.
Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.
OpenAI said it will discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024, without providing a reason for the decision.
That is the strongest indication this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble. Sora burned a ton of processing power, with no clear value proposition, just to keep the hype cycle going a little longer. Shutting down without explanation leaves the most likely one: they are out of helium to pump into the balloon. And if that balloon isn’t inflating, it’s deflating.
It was a weak attempt to keep relevance when faced against Gemini and Claude. But it’s completely unnecessary now that OpenAI has contracted with the government. They get all that sweet tax payer money and get to repurpose a ton of GPUs making stupid videos to supporting that new gov contract.
Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.
It’s not and probably the opposite.
When Sora launched it was way ahead. Seedance 2’s release was notably better than any of the other video gen models, Sora included.
The market is getting commoditized because there’s no moat and OpenAI hasn’t led on pretty much any release for a while now other than Sora, which they’re probably falling behind on now.
This is the opposite of a burst from a tech standpoint, even if OpenAI as a company starts to pop.
TL;DR: This is likely happening because the tech accelerated across the industry in ways OpenAI can’t catch back up to, not because it’s lagging.
Upvoted for a different perspective, but I suspect it ends in the same place.
OpenAI is kept solvent by investor capital, and capital is kept flowing by the perception of OpenAI being the market leader. Seedance being a better model, enough to cause OpenAI to exit the market, still ruptures the perception of value. In a market with no clear profitability path, that’s ground falling away.
It also can’t be simply commoditized because generations (I’m sure even Seedance) are expensive and still not good enough for production use, even if 50% of their consumer base might boycott if a major studio even did use it in production. Commoditization can’t occur when there’s still no economically self-sustaining, market-acceptable “good enough” product. Without that, even if the leader changes, it’s a race between lemmings (sorry) off the cliff.
Yep - they briefly led in video gen but quickly were overtaken by other groups. There are even open source local models that perform really well now.
They could conceivably catch back up but how does that help them when their priority is chasing the AGI/ASI dragon?
i agree that AI is a bubble of trash but shutting off a part that wasn’t worth the cost is not an indication of an end. They just reduced cost to extend the financial runway. From my point of view text and coding were more popular anyway.
As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I’ve gotten this year.
Congrats! 🥳🥳🥳
So many people seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. This isn’t ending AI video creation, it just cost them a lot of money to offer it. You can generate a video on your own computer already. AI video isn’t going away because one company isn’t letting people do it on their servers for free any more.
Didn’t realise you could do it locally, just checked online and there’s several options. So why are these fuckers building huge, resource-greedy data centres. . ?
Real answer: Because they want to own the world.
What you can do locally is slower and with much smaller models.
So they can charge you to do it on your phone…
In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.
We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.
Everybody else gets dropped on the floor.
Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way
Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with “AI”, allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).
GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let’s hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.
RIP Sgt General Jessica Foster. Semper fudge.
Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won’t be coming back.
Most useless pile of jackshit to be ever created.
So youtube will be worth watching again right?
Right?
It still is for the creators there. Instead of browsing the algorithm I start on the subscriptions page, to only see uploads from people I actually want to.
There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time. People just never got recommended the videos despite hitting all the buttons.
For example, did you know both Physics Girl and Tom Scott have returned this month - hopefully a sign that the world can still heal.
Some unsolicited add-on recommendations -
Ublock origin - beyond the addblocking, I use the picker tool to filter all the extra sections like “news”, “trending” “you might like” etc.
Unhook - toggles to disable a bunch of features like comments, home screen, end screen etc.
Enhancer for Youtube - Themeing and a bunch of extra settings like setting defaults for each video. speed, volume, resolution, fill screen (which is different than full screen), PIP while you scroll comments. (The author just did a rework, so it can be a little bugged sometimes - reinstalling it fixed it for me last time it went wonky.
There’s sometimes complaints about “I thought you were dead” when the channel has been uploading regularly the entire time.
Every once in a while, if you have the “notifications” on for a creator it’ll just randomly turn it off. I have a creator that I pay $1/mth subscription to, which you would think YouTube would take as a suggestion that I like that channel and show me when they upload something new. Nope! Instead the algorithm thinks I want to watch a fucking Neo Nazi musician.
It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn’t be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.
But now that’s Google and Grok’s problems, I guess.
If the audio and video is AI-generated I’m going to assume that the script is, too.
I’ve had to do training at work that I’m fairly certain was mostly AI generated. The pics and audio seemed to be. And even the questions that I had to get right in order to complete the training… Some of them just weren’t covered in the training. Come on
Oh no, it was very specific and hard to cram all the words in to the time. Typical Sora is that it’s either screaming or long pauses.
Good.
I absolutely can’t wait for more of this shit to start collapsing financially.
Oh no…stop…don’t go…/s
Sweet now do the whole company
