Last fall, it looked like Sora, a video generation model, was set to be OpenAI’s next big thing. Last week, the company abandoned it completely in a decision so sudden that it even caught Disney by surprise—and the House of Mouse had a $1 billion pledged investment tied to the model. Now, the Wall Street Journal has an autopsy on the decision, and it shows OpenAI in a bind that is becoming increasingly common for AI companies: There’s only so much computing power to go around.
Per the report, OpenAI’s decision to axe Sora came as the company was putting the finishing touches on a new AI model that will reportedly emphasize coding and enterprise services—an area the company has increasingly focused on as it tries to figure out how to turn a profit on any of its products. To launch that model, though, the company needed more compute, which meant it had to make a choice: Keep the resource-intensive Sora up and running, even though it was reportedly losing $1 million per day, or pull the plug and free up those processors for the new model.
OpenAI chose the latter. And while Sora had certainly fallen off in popularity—it went from hitting more than one million users faster than just about any app in history to maintaining fewer than 500,000 active users at the time of its death, per WSJ—there were still people who swore by it and people who were paying for it.
Clearly, there were not enough of them for OpenAI to keep letting them churn out videos with dubious legitimacy under copyright laws, but the whole situation is a good reminder for users of all AI services: The tools you’re using are currently heavily subsidized by the vast amount of investor money that has poured into these companies, and when the bills come due, those tools are either going to disappear like Sora or become prohibitively expensive.
Anthropic recently quietly announced that it will limit user sessions when interacting with its flagship chatbot Claude during peak hours, instituting caps that will affect everyone from free users to those forking over $100 per month for a Claude Max subscription. The implication of that decision is similar to OpenAI’s move to put an end to Sora (though for the exact opposite reason, Claude is too popular rather than a forgotten money pit), which is that these companies will pull the rug if they can’t figure out how to monetize you.
