Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments. But I think you finally see a little bit of a flaw in the strategy or just a little bit of insight into what was desperation for relevance and to try to very quickly attain what other companies have attained but essentially what they're seeing is this gradual reduction in ambition and it's only natural for a lot of companies to overreach, but essentially reality and gravity are pulling them back. And as some other people have mentioned wall Street and others see that coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money and have a really profitable business and there are auxiliary functions. Driving addictive content is not really one that should be at the forefront and while many will continue to do that and we'll have all this generative content, I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
Over time we're probably going to see some really broad and strong use cases of AI, but I think in the case of social media or generative content, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about it. And I'm glad that they're shutting down this app as much as it's great to see innovation and technology and to see how far it's pushed. I prefer to see it when someone like Google does it? Because they're really doing it from the standpoint of this has broad applicable applications to something like simulation or training. Not whatever open AI was doing which honestly just doesn't feel very truthful. I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else. And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.
> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
The addictive toxic content will go the way of tobacco and explore new markets.
Back in 2010 around 11% of the population of Indonesia was connected to the internet. Currently it's closer to 80% - largely via mobile phones. That's approximately 200mln new users.
Nigeria and Pakistan are going through the same change, just started later.
Since 2016 India alone added more users than the mentioned countries combined.
That's a lot of first generation users. More than the entire western population.
I'm reminded of a video from the 80's/90's where researchers took a TV to the Amazon to see how "live off the land" tribes reacted to high technology. Apparently they stopped doing everything and just wanted to watch TV all day. And that was just regular old TV.
Short form video is a special kind of crack. I see even old people getting hypnotized by it. And even worse, they're terrible at determining if something is AI.
I'm gonna try to remember this comment for the next time someone brings up the boiling frog analogy.
Which is usually back to back with the thought that in bygone times "the human mind used to be cleaner / healthier / smarter and it was slowly destroyed by modern living"
There's not that much difference between our behavior and that of a chicken fixated on the chalk line in front of it.
This. What really happened is that someone figured out what makes people give something their undivided attention and is profiting handsomely off of this finding.
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Highly recommend reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.
in the 80's, he wrote about how shift from print media to TV has caused us to trade critical thinking for a 'numbing' addiction to constant amusement. Little did he know about social media..
The hardest part of a 2026 reading of Amusing Ourselves is that nothing within the pages is extraordinary anymore — the book is plainly boring once you know about the internets... definitely groundbreaking, for its time.
Fair point. However, books like these show where society is heading and what values we are promoting as a society.
As an aside, what was really interesting to me was learning that in 1850s white Americans had a 95% literacy rate (highest globally) and were able to easily follow debates between presidential candidates that lasted 3+ hours, and ask relevant questions.
I doubt even the most educated people would be able to do that today. Certainly, I would find it extremely difficult to do so.
>I doubt even the most educated people would be able to do that today.
Certainly this is a valid point.
>able to easily follow debates between presidential candidates that lasted 3+ hours, and ask relevant questions
This is likely one reason for keeping the masses month-to-month (~70% in US, 2024~). I hate to quote this madman, but Father Jones once said (before flavor-aide-ing his entire congregation):
>>~"Keep them poor and tired. If they're poor they won't have time to organize; if they're tired they won't have energy to fight back"~
----
>1850s white Americans had a 95% literacy rate (highest globally)
Working in construction these past few decades, some of my favorite co-workers have barely been able to read — yet are brilliant field electricians (that often can read blueprints — but fuck this engineer they'll proudly mumble, often ["what the hell was he thinking, here?! wuz he thinkin'?!"]).
fuck this guy . laughter
----
I fully support returning to a time when countries had smaller populations and embraced technologies in running themselves, their more-isolated population's needs.
As an older millenial american, I fully support the breakdown of USA into smaller territories (too large to reasonably rule, IMHO).
>some sort of dick measuring competition like some stupid 20 y/o over enthusiastic frat boys.
From my privileged perspective (as brother to a state-level politician, up for re-election this year) this isn't too far from his truth. I love him in the brotherly-required manner — but do not understand his ivory towered viewpoints. I've only ever seen him humbled, twice: after crashing his first motorcycle; getting arrested with him in 2003, no mercy to those officers.
All my brothers are very successful — making me blacksheep (along with a mentally-deficient step-brother == "doesn't count") — they'll often pull the "I grew up poor" punchline... my retort is that I'm the only one that got poorer. Through fault of my own, admittedly.
----
None have outside "real world" perspective, having spent their entire lives in the educational _e_-daycares which can extend up to entire bayarea tech campus cafeteriæ. Surprising, moron-bro actually "served" 2003-2006, and even with a seventy-something IQ still knows a few things that 130+ IQ-bro-bros DON'T.
Definitely I'm proud of my brothers, but none of them are in the 70% of household that live month-to-month... while I've spent decades of adultlife struggling (willingly) so.
Not to say it's a hallucination, but, to modern standards, if this were publicly funded research, it seems like it would have been a gross violation of ethics or other non-technical criteria. Interested to see how people think of it in later years, e.g., now.
In a sufficiently isolated population, you get the same effect from a sound-making greeting card, or a battery powered light and/or sound toy from a carnival.
And for what it's worth, tomorrow they don't miss whatever “indistinguishable from magic” thing, so no harm done.
On TV, content changes all the time. It is "always new". In your examples, content is the same over and over. They would not be fascinating for too long because the novelty would wear off. Very different.
I was responding to the "violation of ethics". Both are novel or fascinating for a bit, no harm no foul.
And to be clear, same effect from a Kodak slide projector and carousel, just one carousel, endlessly fascinating. Anything is. A carved stick toy is. If you let them have the carnival gizmo, they'll wear it out. If you take it back, they happily go back to their toy made out of a stick.
If anything, a defining characteristic is a lack of boredom, that novelty doesn't wear off from things westerners might find quickly dull. At the same time, sameness and change are taken in stride, along with a disregard for aggregate time in general, neither planning ahead nor regard for "spending" it. Everything is in the moment.
> On TV, content changes all the time. It is "always new".
Personally I think this also is what makes reddit so addictive as well. I want to read all the threads on the subreddits I enjoy... which is impossible, because there's always new interesting posts.
I got rid of Instagram for 3 years, redownloaded and spent maybe 2 hours watching reels of Italian American family humor. It felt like a trance. I’ve since redeleted the app.
There was a report lately that smartphones brought to young natives in rural areas of Amazon/etc., completely stopped learning the skills that helped the tribes to survive (hunting etc.)
"coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money"
Is it?
I have the impression GenAI deteriorates the internet both from a content and tech perspective.
Bots that waste your time because they don't work well or because they are pushing an agenda, and low quality content that floods social media from people who want to make a quick buck.
GitHub and AWS became increasingly unstable. X, Instagram, and WhatsApp are suddenly sprinkled with subtle bugs.
Everything just got faster and we got more of it, but nothing of it is good anymore because everyone tries to replace 90% of their work with GenAI instead ofmaybe starting at 10-20% and then add more when you're sure it works.
I fear people will just get used to it. Nobody gets tailored clothing anyhmore and people don't question that we have standardized sizes that don't really fit anyone properly. People commonly buy standardized furniture and rarely get something to a specific for their room. If cheaper software (I mean thats mostly what it is) gets the job done, we will probably just keep doing that, even if that means we lose something in the process.
That's kind of my concern so far. We haven't seen a lot of big AI deployment success cases, but of the few mildly successful ones we HAVE heard of, they're 100% about cost saving / perceived efficiency and never about actually making a _better_ product or service.
I think it factors into why public perception is increasingly anti-AI. It'd be one thing if people were losing jobs, but on the other hand, their daily chores were done by a robot. Instead, people are losing (or fearing losing) their jobs, while increasingly having to fight with AI chatbots for customer support and similar cost-center use cases.
It's like AI is the "high fructose corn syrup" of tech. Nobody's arguing the output is better--it's just a lot cheaper and faster to get there, so that's its legacy. Making things cheaper and worse.
I am old enough to remember the outages of aws, gcp and azure which predate the gen ai thing. And of course the countless, endless, hopeless procession of bugs in just about anything else.
I am running it in a large mid cap company (~25bn revenue). For the first time we are releasing stuff which does not suck, and we are releasing it 5x faster than before. Its real for us, produces real, measureable economic value.
Now, how does anthropic or google make any money on those 250 p/m subs i have no idea.
>Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments.
Ironically, starting your response with this guarantees a lot of people won't read it. It's the same as going on reddit and starting a reply with, "Nobody will see this but", and hoping that people try to prove you wrong by reading and commenting on it. I stopped after the first sentence. People really have to stop with the clickbait vomit way of writing.
Coding is one topic but the big one is agentic ai.
You will have an agent like your seo expert, this agent will be able to use common tools like google seo, facebook seo etc. and you will teach how you want it to do its 'job'.
You will have a way of delivering your requirements to it, it will run in the background, might ask for feedback but will otherwise do stuff similiar to whatever person was doing it before.
There might be some transition phase like verifing the data of the real person vs. the agentic ai then moving over to only validation until the agentic agent is in avg as good as a human. Then the human will be gone.
Agentic will take basic support tasks (its actually already doing this) first, then more complicated things etc.
For this we need an ecosystem aka the agentic ai platform, interconnect between agent and tools and this stuff is currently getting build by someone one way or the other.
On scale we need more capacity and these agents will also cost more money than a 20$ subscription.
But if you have a, lets say SAP agent, it will be build once, trained once and than used by everyone. Instead of a person using a HR system or billing system, the agent will bridge the gap between data and system.
Had Waffle House with some friends who mostly work in blue collar industries. One guy who works at a timber mill used Claude code to redo their ordering system. Took him about a month to go from knowing nothing about Claude Code to finishing the system. Basically just copied a proprietary software product that costs them upward $20k a year. They’re keeping that other product to cross check but so far the Claude coded item works great, and is of course more custom to their business. The dudes a hero at work because the system is heads and tails better.
Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.
I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.
I also prefer seeing a corporation like Google do it for two reasons: generative content might feed their cash cow also known as “YouTube” and Google already has a good base for coding assistants. Google owns, I think, 25% of Anthropic and earns money selling compute infrastructure to Anthropic. Personally I think Antigravity (with Claude and Gemini) and gemini-cli firmly keeps Google in the running as far as AI coding tools goes. I want to do business with companies that have a sustainable business plan. Google’s AI products for tech work, and ProtonMail’s Lumo+ product for all private daily web search and chatbot functionality is enough for me; I used to chase every commercial AI offering but not anymore.
I like the framing of trying explosive things to escape the pull of gravity. When applied to rockets, it means a lot of stuff blowing up, which again seems apt.
For OpenAI that was and felt like some side husle they were playing around nothing more.
Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.
At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.
>I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
They're not, they just already have the habit formed with the place they go to do that. Ultimately anything worth seeing on sora will be reposted to Tiktok.
I had fun with it for about a week, but the thing that disappointed me the most wasn't the technology, it was the _people_. You have a machine that can make anything you can imagine, and the space of what people were exploring was so _small_.
> I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else.
[...] do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.
For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's
shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their
fingers.
But all their works they do for to be seen of men [...]
> And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.
[...] they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.
That man was later nailed to a plank for literally no reason.
I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
As someone who generally liked the products that OpenAI puts out, I think Sora was their first product that I really didn't like. I liked GPT primarily because I felt like it respected me: I never felt like it was trying to distract me from my work or get me to waste time doomscrolling. It's primary value proposition to keep me using it wasn't to trick me with addictive content, but to get me high quality answers as fast as possible. And I felt like OpenAI's other products, like Deep Research, agent mode, etc, were the same way. Even Atlas, although I suspect it will be equally ill-fated, attempts to follow this same pattern. It really felt like OpenAI was separating themselves from the common popular apps like Tiktok, Reddit, Instagram, etc, which seemed to exist entirely to distract me from things I care about and waste my time.
Sora was the first product OpenAI shipped where I felt that fell into that second category, and for that I was very disappointed. You have all those GPUs, and the most incredible technology in the world, and the most brilliant engineers, and all you can think to do with them is to make an app that just makes meme videos? I mean, c'mon!
Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there? Even if Sora wasn't a spectacular success, it seems to me like subsequent model improvements could have moved the needle - shutting it down so soon seems premature. I mean, what if this is the equivalent of making ChatGPT with GPT 3?
The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that
Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"
Man I find the HN crowd so cross and fickle sometimes. I think it’s just because when companies get bad rep it affects how people view the products? Im autistic and tend to focus on the tech
SORA ( whatever that means) was one of the most astounding demos I’ve probably ever seen ( ChatGPT was more gradual ).
The shock and awe of rendered AI video blew my mind.
Yes months later everyone can do it and is bored by it and has strong opinions about what is right for society or not.
But it was a monumental piece of tech and I personally ( clearly incorrectly ) think the top comments should be appreciative of the release and the impact
Personally I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market But I don’t know enough tbh
> OpenAI launched Sora last September, aiming to expand its dominance among consumers by creating a TikTok-style social feed that allowed users to share AI-generated content with one another.
I never understood what this app was about. TikTok (and I would argue most modern social media platforms) isn’t really about sharing things with friends, it’s about entertainment. Most people watch TikToks and YouTube videos because they are entertaining. Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?
Not good, seems like they are running out of cash and partners abandoning them. They had no real moat to be fair. Anthropic eating their lunch in enterprise and other players have cashflows from other businesses (XAI, Google)
To focus on code generation - arguably the easiest problem to solve.
So strange that they fell behind after leading the charge on video from Will Smith spaghetti through the spectacular launch of Sora.
Turns out anyone can get that look by appending “like an Octane render”
Beyond that, like Kling and Hailou quickly surpassed them on product, and OpenAI never even attempted text-to-3d as if they are entirely uninterested in rich media.
OpenAI reminds me more of Meta than any other company. They’re both pioneering in their space and yet are mere commandeers (not innovators) when it comes to technology and importantly end user products.
They’ll also be extremely valuable, like Meta due to their ad product and ever-growing user base over the next 10 years, and I guess by focusing on code they plan to capture a segment of the developer market à la React or Swift.
Will OpenAI release a language or framework? An IDE? I bet the chat paradigm stays for the ad product and aging user base (lol) while the exciting innovation will happen in code automation and product development - an area they are not really experts in.
As a big user of ai video gen(my Google veo bill last month was $130) this doesn’t affect me in the slightest.
There’s so many video gen models out there and given the cheaper Chinese models I’m not surprised they closed this down. Besides the initial push, any marketing regarding video gen has always been the Kling or Higgsfield models. Just never a reason to do sora
I used Sora for a very brief time in late 2025. As ridiculous as the videos usually were, I always thought there was more evidence of human creativity and culture on there than on a standard, uncurated Youtube Shorts or Instagram Reels feed. AI-generated video presents some unique terrors to society, but I think most of the criticism of Sora could be directed equally to more 'traditional' social media. In any case, Sora is an impressive display of technology, but a poor product. I'm not too surprised it's getting killed.
It was neat to be able to try my own prompts and get a sense of what the state of video generation was. But I certainly never generated something that I thought I got real value out of on its own merits, and I still don't understand why there was a social media component to the app.
Crazy how far the hype dropped from this product when only the paid influencers had access we were told "It's like a reality simulator" but when it became widely distributed it didn't deliver anywhere near that hype, you look at the front page of it today and it's identical to the Grok video gen front page, very underwhelming.
Apparently, all possible movies, cinematics and ads have been generated by "enthusiasts at home", so the tool is no longer needed.
On a more serious note, it could be a sign of a more powerful and general model being developed/released in the near future, that would include Sora capabilities. Or AI-doomers were right, and this sunset is one of the proofs for them.
Sora clearly was a waste of ressources. I liked using it for a few days, but I could tell it was consuming an insane amount of compute for 10-15 second videos that only a dozen people might watch.
This was inevitable since Antropic made a fortune by releasing single app with only text generation business. They did best code generator and targeted developers and enterprise users. OpenAI did only 1.5 million dollars from Sora which is obviously far from profitable. So it is logical to assign GPU time to more profitable business.
Generative video is insanely expensive and OpenAI is burning through money. They need to use the compute on things that they actually might make money on - like enterprise Codex usage.
OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.
Sora shocked people but the real effect was and is that now people don't believe what the're shown. How many fingers Israeli PM has, was Russia Dictator alive, etc. Is this good? Critical thinking - maybe... uncertainity... not really.
Seedance 2.0 is about to eat reap the market gap Sora creates. It's truly superior in every way. It felt like Sora was stunted by OpenAI for long, consistent video generation (not to mention the crazy red tape around what you could generate).
Disney's involvement with this was always strange. Their business lives and dies on the strength of their characters and their designs - why would you risk allowing a service to dilute them down and maybe misuse them?
This makes sense. OpenAI correctly realized overindexong on consumer where there isn’t money is not the right way. By not focusing on enterprise they ceded the market to Claude. Now they are rethinking and pivoting
Google gets stick for closing down applications after a decade. But OpenAI’s strategy seems to be to throw sh*t at the wall to see what sticks, but no company will (should) use a tool that could disappear in 6 months.
I tried using Sora for a month. Never paid for it. I tried many different ways of prompting and I was always underwhelmed by its output. The generation would also take so long and there was like a 50% chance it would fail due to content violations. I will say though that it was kind of addicting in a way. Just trying to crank the lever and see what would come out. But you'd always leave disappointed. It was a casino where the operator was losing money for every play.
I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..
I can appreciate that the technology and research behind Sora could be helpful for many things, but I do not see anything good coming out of the consumer facing application.
The only video generation tools showing any real progress or promise are world model-based. That's probably why they did this: either to refocus on coding/cowork type tools (less likely) or to devote that money and compute to building their answer to stuff like Project Genie.
It's super expensive for them to run this hardware. And they need the compute for other things. Everyone who's cursed open AI for going down in the middle of the day whenever they're using it to write code or do some other thing, will breathe a little easier now that there's some compute available. Wise decision, in my opinion.
I never quite got "why" they made it a separate app. While I'm sure it was fun for a while, this felt like something that had limited staying power as the novelty is what was driving it. People don't really want to switch between video apps for their entertainment and having it be Sora only is too limiting.
Google Graveyard is joined by OpenAI. That's one problem of those big corporations - they eagerly kill off products and projects willy-nilly. It may make businss sense but why the prior promo? Those promos have been a lie, just like the cake was.
at least they‘re not trying to play the „our tech is too dangerous“ card as the sunset reason (again [yet]).
also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…
851 comments
Over time we're probably going to see some really broad and strong use cases of AI, but I think in the case of social media or generative content, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about it. And I'm glad that they're shutting down this app as much as it's great to see innovation and technology and to see how far it's pushed. I prefer to see it when someone like Google does it? Because they're really doing it from the standpoint of this has broad applicable applications to something like simulation or training. Not whatever open AI was doing which honestly just doesn't feel very truthful. I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else. And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it.
> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
The addictive toxic content will go the way of tobacco and explore new markets.
Back in 2010 around 11% of the population of Indonesia was connected to the internet. Currently it's closer to 80% - largely via mobile phones. That's approximately 200mln new users.
Nigeria and Pakistan are going through the same change, just started later.
Since 2016 India alone added more users than the mentioned countries combined.
That's a lot of first generation users. More than the entire western population.
Short form video is a special kind of crack. I see even old people getting hypnotized by it. And even worse, they're terrible at determining if something is AI.
Which is usually back to back with the thought that in bygone times "the human mind used to be cleaner / healthier / smarter and it was slowly destroyed by modern living"
There's not that much difference between our behavior and that of a chicken fixated on the chalk line in front of it.
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-world-is-to...
in the 80's, he wrote about how shift from print media to TV has caused us to trade critical thinking for a 'numbing' addiction to constant amusement. Little did he know about social media..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
As an aside, what was really interesting to me was learning that in 1850s white Americans had a 95% literacy rate (highest globally) and were able to easily follow debates between presidential candidates that lasted 3+ hours, and ask relevant questions.
I doubt even the most educated people would be able to do that today. Certainly, I would find it extremely difficult to do so.
>I doubt even the most educated people would be able to do that today.
Certainly this is a valid point.
>able to easily follow debates between presidential candidates that lasted 3+ hours, and ask relevant questions
This is likely one reason for keeping the masses month-to-month (~70% in US, 2024~). I hate to quote this madman, but Father Jones once said (before flavor-aide-ing his entire congregation):
>>~"Keep them poor and tired. If they're poor they won't have time to organize; if they're tired they won't have energy to fight back"~
----
>1850s white Americans had a 95% literacy rate (highest globally)
Working in construction these past few decades, some of my favorite co-workers have barely been able to read — yet are brilliant field electricians (that often can read blueprints — but fuck this engineer they'll proudly mumble, often ["what the hell was he thinking, here?! wuz he thinkin'?!"]).
fuck this guy . laughter
----
I fully support returning to a time when countries had smaller populations and embraced technologies in running themselves, their more-isolated population's needs.
As an older millenial american, I fully support the breakdown of USA into smaller territories (too large to reasonably rule, IMHO).
>some sort of dick measuring competition like some stupid 20 y/o over enthusiastic frat boys.
From my privileged perspective (as brother to a state-level politician, up for re-election this year) this isn't too far from his truth. I love him in the brotherly-required manner — but do not understand his ivory towered viewpoints. I've only ever seen him humbled, twice: after crashing his first motorcycle; getting arrested with him in 2003, no mercy to those officers.
All my brothers are very successful — making me blacksheep (along with a mentally-deficient step-brother == "doesn't count") — they'll often pull the "I grew up poor" punchline... my retort is that I'm the only one that got poorer. Through fault of my own, admittedly.
----
None have outside "real world" perspective, having spent their entire lives in the educational _e_-daycares which can extend up to entire bayarea tech campus cafeteriæ. Surprising, moron-bro actually "served" 2003-2006, and even with a seventy-something IQ still knows a few things that 130+ IQ-bro-bros DON'T.
Definitely I'm proud of my brothers, but none of them are in the 70% of household that live month-to-month... while I've spent decades of adultlife struggling (willingly) so.
//rant//freeTherapy//thanks
Not to say it's a hallucination, but, to modern standards, if this were publicly funded research, it seems like it would have been a gross violation of ethics or other non-technical criteria. Interested to see how people think of it in later years, e.g., now.
In a sufficiently isolated population, you get the same effect from a sound-making greeting card, or a battery powered light and/or sound toy from a carnival.
And for what it's worth, tomorrow they don't miss whatever “indistinguishable from magic” thing, so no harm done.
// grew up near such areas
And to be clear, same effect from a Kodak slide projector and carousel, just one carousel, endlessly fascinating. Anything is. A carved stick toy is. If you let them have the carnival gizmo, they'll wear it out. If you take it back, they happily go back to their toy made out of a stick.
If anything, a defining characteristic is a lack of boredom, that novelty doesn't wear off from things westerners might find quickly dull. At the same time, sameness and change are taken in stride, along with a disregard for aggregate time in general, neither planning ahead nor regard for "spending" it. Everything is in the moment.
> On TV, content changes all the time. It is "always new".
Personally I think this also is what makes reddit so addictive as well. I want to read all the threads on the subreddits I enjoy... which is impossible, because there's always new interesting posts.
But yeah, scrolling short form is crack
There was a report lately that smartphones brought to young natives in rural areas of Amazon/etc., completely stopped learning the skills that helped the tribes to survive (hunting etc.)
Is it?
I have the impression GenAI deteriorates the internet both from a content and tech perspective.
Bots that waste your time because they don't work well or because they are pushing an agenda, and low quality content that floods social media from people who want to make a quick buck.
GitHub and AWS became increasingly unstable. X, Instagram, and WhatsApp are suddenly sprinkled with subtle bugs.
Everything just got faster and we got more of it, but nothing of it is good anymore because everyone tries to replace 90% of their work with GenAI instead ofmaybe starting at 10-20% and then add more when you're sure it works.
I think it factors into why public perception is increasingly anti-AI. It'd be one thing if people were losing jobs, but on the other hand, their daily chores were done by a robot. Instead, people are losing (or fearing losing) their jobs, while increasingly having to fight with AI chatbots for customer support and similar cost-center use cases.
It's like AI is the "high fructose corn syrup" of tech. Nobody's arguing the output is better--it's just a lot cheaper and faster to get there, so that's its legacy. Making things cheaper and worse.
I am running it in a large mid cap company (~25bn revenue). For the first time we are releasing stuff which does not suck, and we are releasing it 5x faster than before. Its real for us, produces real, measureable economic value.
Now, how does anthropic or google make any money on those 250 p/m subs i have no idea.
Saves the company a ton of money
> where you can make money and have a really profitable business
I am not convinced. Nobody is making money, every player is losing money hand over fist.
In this case, maybe not enough to offset the costs; or maybe it just wasn't addictive enough. But it's still early days.
>Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments.
Ironically, starting your response with this guarantees a lot of people won't read it. It's the same as going on reddit and starting a reply with, "Nobody will see this but", and hoping that people try to prove you wrong by reading and commenting on it. I stopped after the first sentence. People really have to stop with the clickbait vomit way of writing.
You will have an agent like your seo expert, this agent will be able to use common tools like google seo, facebook seo etc. and you will teach how you want it to do its 'job'.
You will have a way of delivering your requirements to it, it will run in the background, might ask for feedback but will otherwise do stuff similiar to whatever person was doing it before.
There might be some transition phase like verifing the data of the real person vs. the agentic ai then moving over to only validation until the agentic agent is in avg as good as a human. Then the human will be gone.
Agentic will take basic support tasks (its actually already doing this) first, then more complicated things etc.
For this we need an ecosystem aka the agentic ai platform, interconnect between agent and tools and this stuff is currently getting build by someone one way or the other.
On scale we need more capacity and these agents will also cost more money than a 20$ subscription.
But if you have a, lets say SAP agent, it will be build once, trained once and than used by everyone. Instead of a person using a HR system or billing system, the agent will bridge the gap between data and system.
Obviously caveat emperor but there are a lot of real world scenarios like this.
I think Anthropic and OpenAi are trying to all cool and apple-y with their branding but these use cases are just tools getting work done. Most normal people don’t need or want AGI, or even AI slop videos. They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a change.
>
"reality and gravity are pulling them back"I like the framing of trying explosive things to escape the pull of gravity. When applied to rockets, it means a lot of stuff blowing up, which again seems apt.
Having Disney on their side was def quite a smart/interesting move.
At least from one interview, they def had resource issues last year and teams had to fight for it. Can easily be that sora was always priortized down and they realized it doesn't make sense to spend that much capacity while then not being able to push their main model.
>I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
They're not, they just already have the habit formed with the place they go to do that. Ultimately anything worth seeing on sora will be reposted to Tiktok.
> coding is the prime use case for this where you can make money
Which makes me wonder... what's the business model long-term of AI generated art places?
>Sometimes I think my opinion means nothing on these topics, especially when it's going to get buried in a thread of 500 plus comments.
Use flameview: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25713858
Life-changing for HN users.
> I think consumers are slightly smarter now that they don't want to be drawn into this kind of addictive toxic content.
Considering the large million plus view counts I see AI slop getting on FB and YouTube I'm not seeing this behaviour play out.
> I feel like they say one thing and do something else or they say one thing and the agenda or something else.
> And again, I don't know how helpful it is to comment like this, but I feel like if you understand the truth then you should speak the truth even if it only benefits one other person to hear it. That man was later nailed to a plank for literally no reason.Nothing is new under the sun.
After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.
Sora was the first product OpenAI shipped where I felt that fell into that second category, and for that I was very disappointed. You have all those GPUs, and the most incredible technology in the world, and the most brilliant engineers, and all you can think to do with them is to make an app that just makes meme videos? I mean, c'mon!
Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there? Even if Sora wasn't a spectacular success, it seems to me like subsequent model improvements could have moved the needle - shutting it down so soon seems premature. I mean, what if this is the equivalent of making ChatGPT with GPT 3?
Not a great look that either the teams responsible for Sora didn't know this was coming or the decision was so brash that things changed overnight.
In practice people would just generate the videos with the app then post them on regular social media in which case OAI would not get the ad revenue for that
Its the age-old "your product is just a subset of another product"
SORA ( whatever that means) was one of the most astounding demos I’ve probably ever seen ( ChatGPT was more gradual ).
The shock and awe of rendered AI video blew my mind.
Yes months later everyone can do it and is bored by it and has strong opinions about what is right for society or not.
But it was a monumental piece of tech and I personally ( clearly incorrectly ) think the top comments should be appreciative of the release and the impact
Personally I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market But I don’t know enough tbh
Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
> OpenAI launched Sora last September, aiming to expand its dominance among consumers by creating a TikTok-style social feed that allowed users to share AI-generated content with one another.
I never understood what this app was about. TikTok (and I would argue most modern social media platforms) isn’t really about sharing things with friends, it’s about entertainment. Most people watch TikToks and YouTube videos because they are entertaining. Beyond the initial 2-3 minutes of novelty, what do AI generated videos really have to offer when there is no shortage of people making professional, high quality content on competing platforms?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
So strange that they fell behind after leading the charge on video from Will Smith spaghetti through the spectacular launch of Sora.
Turns out anyone can get that look by appending “like an Octane render”
Beyond that, like Kling and Hailou quickly surpassed them on product, and OpenAI never even attempted text-to-3d as if they are entirely uninterested in rich media.
OpenAI reminds me more of Meta than any other company. They’re both pioneering in their space and yet are mere commandeers (not innovators) when it comes to technology and importantly end user products.
They’ll also be extremely valuable, like Meta due to their ad product and ever-growing user base over the next 10 years, and I guess by focusing on code they plan to capture a segment of the developer market à la React or Swift.
Will OpenAI release a language or framework? An IDE? I bet the chat paradigm stays for the ad product and aging user base (lol) while the exciting innovation will happen in code automation and product development - an area they are not really experts in.
- sora was not great at making what you asked
- i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
- every video that was good needed editing outside of sora (and therefore could not be shared within sora)
just my experience
They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in developer mind share (see, people who buy tokens) and want a piece.
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
There’s so many video gen models out there and given the cheaper Chinese models I’m not surprised they closed this down. Besides the initial push, any marketing regarding video gen has always been the Kling or Higgsfield models. Just never a reason to do sora
* It was (assumedly) expensive to run.
* It was not good enough for customers to seriously pay for.
* There were too many content restrictions for it to be fun for most people.
On a more serious note, it could be a sign of a more powerful and general model being developed/released in the near future, that would include Sora capabilities. Or AI-doomers were right, and this sunset is one of the proofs for them.
Then they killed Dall-E 2 and my credits vaporized.
Anybody found themselves in the same situation? What have you done?
But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.
OpenAI is bleeding money faster than they can afford to and they are literally running out of people that they can go to for more. They need to stop the bleeding.
I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..
I can appreciate that the technology and research behind Sora could be helpful for many things, but I do not see anything good coming out of the consumer facing application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE
Sora was a perfect example of using a lot of compute to generate the video -> we need a lot of GPUs -> a lot of RAMs -> energy and land
I am predicting in the next 6 months RAM shortage will soften, not too much, because war in the Middle East will have additional impact for some time.
also, for a company carrying „open“ in their name, that pretends to still remember its origins, they could open source at least the projects they sunset…