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.
throw4847285•Mar 24, 2026
Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?
Wow. OpenAI is the weirdest company in the planet.
I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.
This data is pretty questionable. OpenAI employees have said on Twitter that it does not account for ChatGPT Enterprise, where most of their growth is, which is quote-only and not paid by credit card.
radicality•Mar 24, 2026
You have more info about the inflated token use? I’m using codex cli a bunch now, but the reported token usage seems like an order of magnitude higher than, say Claude code with opus.
Idk if it’s because I set codex to xhigh reasoning, but even then it still seems way higher than Claude. The input/output ratio feels large too, eg I have codex session which says ~500M in / ~2M out.
moralestapia•Mar 24, 2026
I wish I had hard evidence but it is mostly an observation. I do use Codex a lot and I felt a drastic change from like one-two months ago to this day.
It used to give me precise answers, "surgical" is how I described it to my friends. Now it generates a lot of slop and plenty of "follow ups". It doesn't give me wrong answers, which is ok, but I've found that things that used to take 3-4 prompts now take 8-10. Obviously my prompting skills haven't changed much and, if anything, they've become better.
This is something that other colleagues have observed as well. Even the same GPT5.4 model feels different and more chatty recently. Btw, I think their version numbers mean nothing, no one can be certain about the model that is actually running on the backend and it is pretty evident that they're continuously "improving" it.
toraway•Mar 24, 2026
Yes, and Disney is apparently no longer investing in OpenAI, making one more example of an OpenAI investment hype cycle that turned out to be hot air.
Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora.
“As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” a Disney spokesperson 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.”
Also "exit the video generation business" seems somewhat notable, suggesting they're not just planning to launch a different video gen product to replace Sora?
mcast•Mar 24, 2026
I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from Google!
2001zhaozhao•Mar 24, 2026
We need a 'killed by OpenAI' site now
ignoramous•Mar 24, 2026
I'd wager that b2c projects former VP of Product at Instagram & CPO at OpenAI, Kevin Weil, may have championed are getting the boot with the company refocusing on making money under the stewardship of Fidji Simo: https://www.businessinsider.com/fidji-simo-openai-product-re...
Unlike, say, Seedance 2.0 (which has yet to come to the West), Sora 2 was more of a tech demo than anything usable:
* 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.
hexage1814•Mar 24, 2026
I heard Seedance is also full of restrictions now, although the model seems to be better at that sort of “cinematic” look, which might allow it to compete with Veo 3 and the like.
The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.
Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.
ronsor•Mar 24, 2026
Seedance has a lot more restrictions now, but still arguably not as much, it's probably cheaper for ByteDance to run, and as you said, it at least looks good enough to be worth paying for.
Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
taytus•Mar 24, 2026
How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?
iainctduncan•Mar 24, 2026
You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...
Imnimo•Mar 24, 2026
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.
2001zhaozhao•Mar 24, 2026
They wanted network effects because ChatGPT was sorely lacking any.
I actually thought the Sora app was promising at launch, at least on paper, but it seems like they failed to keep people's attention long term. With the failure of Sora i don't think they have good options left.
timpera•Mar 24, 2026
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.
ChrisArchitect•Mar 24, 2026
an official post
> We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.
We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work. – The Sora Team
*Forcing AI devtools down everyones throat is where the money is.
Shovel selling and instruments to dismantle whats left of working class power.
bibimsz•Mar 24, 2026
Software engineers have spent the last 40 years automating away other people's jobs. The discomfort only seems to start when the automation points inward.
bibimsz•Mar 24, 2026
I hit a nerve
paxys•Mar 24, 2026
How are they going to claw back the market from Anthropic though?
lossyalgo•Mar 24, 2026
Imagine all the money they can save on Sora which surely cost them way more than regular LLM usage, that they can now invest into suave Superbowl ads trash-talking Claude.
I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.
softwaredoug•Mar 24, 2026
Sora was fun
But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.
Sir_Twist•Mar 24, 2026
> 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?
mjr00•Mar 24, 2026
> 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?
I don't know where they got September from; Sora launched in Feb 2024[0] which was a bit before people had become tired of awful AI-generated content. There was real belief that people would be willing to spend all day scrolling a social network with infinite AI-generated content. See the similar hype with Suno AI, which started a whole "musicians are obsolete" movement before becoming mostly irrelevant.
I think Sora 2 produced quite good videos, at least of a certain type. It was very good at producing convincing low-resolution cellphone footage. Unfortunately you had to have a very creative mind to get anything interesting out of it, as the copyright and content restrictions were a big "no fun allowed" clause, which contributed to its demise. Everything on the main Sora page was the same "cute animals doing something wholesome and unexpected" video.
My "favorite" part was how the post-generation checks would self-report. e.g. It was impossible to make a video of an angry chef with a British accent because Sora would always overfit it to Gordon Ramsey, and flag its own generated video after it was created!
> In February 2024, OpenAI previewed examples of its output to the public,[1] with the first generation of Sora released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in the US and Canada in December 2024[2][3] and the second generation, Sora 2, was released to select users in the US and Canada at the end of September 2025.
This move makes a lot of sense to me. It never felt like OpenAI was seriously going to try to launch a video-based social network. It was more of a fun way to demonstrate the power of the video generation models, and also to gauge the market and assess: if you put the power to generate videos in the hands of the people, what kinds of videos will they generate?
So OpenAI has done the right thing as a startup here, gotten lots of training data, and observed lots of user behavior that they can now apply going forward.
The Sora models, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere, and I believe OpenAI will continue to invest in them. They’re getting better and better, just like Google’s Veo, which is quite good at generating videos as well.
Using Codex and agent skills, it’s actually quite easy to generate a storyboard and then have a list of shots in that storyboard. Then generate videos from those storyboard stills, and then finally assemble those individual video files into a final movie file using something like ffmpeg. It's also very easy to create a voiceover with TTS and even simple music using ChatGPT Containers (aka the python tool).
This will 'democratize' (ha ha, for people with money obvi) a lot of video creation going forward. Against all wisdom, I am actually quite bullish on this technology, especially in the hands of young people. They are very creative and have lots of stories to share.
Necessary disclaimer as usual around the ethics of how these models were created: all the AI companies have totally ripped off artists in service of creating these models. I wish something would be done about that but I'm not holding my breath. No politician seems to want to touch it.
ronsor•Mar 24, 2026
I'm bullish on video generation technology, but honestly not on OpenAI or any Western company's deployment of it. I think they'll all mostly suffer from the same problems that Sora did.
_doctor_love•Mar 24, 2026
Yes, sadly, the West is not the leader. The work done by the Chinese labs is just so damn good.
msabalau•Mar 24, 2026
Yeah, their forth place video model does not go away, but they didn't ink a billion dollar with Disney that's just gone up in flames because they "weren't serious"
This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.
_doctor_love•Mar 24, 2026
> it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.
Agree, and didn't intend to imply that. This is just a good startup move that gets a big headline because it's OpenAI. Other startups around the world do the same thing all the time.
mikhmha•Mar 24, 2026
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..
poemxo•Mar 24, 2026
gpt-image-1.5 works decently for generating images compared to old Sora, but you pay per generation. It's possible that monthly flat rates were too much of a loss leader for OpenAI. I imagine the server side cost for generating video for Sora 2 is much higher as well.
vunderba•Mar 24, 2026
You also have access to gpt-image-1.5 in the regular ChatGPT interface if you pay for a flat subscription - though I don't know how many images it limits you to per month.
Kye•Mar 24, 2026
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.
For years now people have been saying Anthropic is falling behind because they don't have an image or video generation model. Turns out it was the right decision all along.
xnx•Mar 24, 2026
Generated video is useful and valuable, but Sora was not a frontier model.
Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.
4k0hz•Mar 24, 2026
Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases except maybe stock video generation.
18 Comments
https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
I used to think they were pretty clever but with this news and other recent ones (Jony Ive project cancelled, Stargate scaled down significantly, their models inflating token use on purpose) they just seem schizo.
Idk if it’s because I set codex to xhigh reasoning, but even then it still seems way higher than Claude. The input/output ratio feels large too, eg I have codex session which says ~500M in / ~2M out.
It used to give me precise answers, "surgical" is how I described it to my friends. Now it generates a lot of slop and plenty of "follow ups". It doesn't give me wrong answers, which is ok, but I've found that things that used to take 3-4 prompts now take 8-10. Obviously my prompting skills haven't changed much and, if anything, they've become better.
This is something that other colleagues have observed as well. Even the same GPT5.4 model feels different and more chatty recently. Btw, I think their version numbers mean nothing, no one can be certain about the model that is actually running on the backend and it is pretty evident that they're continuously "improving" it.
Disney Exits OpenAI Deal After AI Giant Shutters Sora
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
Also "exit the video generation business" seems somewhat notable, suggesting they're not just planning to launch a different video gen product to replace Sora?Weil's now heading "AI for Science": https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...
* 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.
The issue is that Sora ended up getting the short end of the stick: by generating the footage, it became the primary target of complaints. Meanwhile, they were forced to remove the videos, but people simply took those videos and uploaded them to random social media platforms like Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube, which ended up hosting the content while being much less of a target, since the content wasn’t generated there.
Honestly, I think the only way forward will be to wait for local models to become good enough so that you can run something like Sora locally and generate whatever you want.
Sora had all of the downsides, and attracted all of the scrutiny. Local-first is definitely the way.
I actually thought the Sora app was promising at launch, at least on paper, but it seems like they failed to keep people's attention long term. With the failure of Sora i don't think they have good options left.
> We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing.
We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work. – The Sora Team
(https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382)
Coding is where the money is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
Shovel selling and instruments to dismantle whats left of working class power.
I also wonder if they got the $1B from Disney? Was that even a paid for deal? Or just another "announced" deal? Every article I found doesn't mention anyone signing any paperwork - which seems to be typical of AI journalism these days. Every AI deal is supposedly inked but if you dig deeper, all you find are adjectives like proclaimed, announced, agreed upon.
But it was largely fun to try to transgress against the limitations. Who could trick the AI to generate something outlandish and ridiculous.
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?
I don't know where they got September from; Sora launched in Feb 2024[0] which was a bit before people had become tired of awful AI-generated content. There was real belief that people would be willing to spend all day scrolling a social network with infinite AI-generated content. See the similar hype with Suno AI, which started a whole "musicians are obsolete" movement before becoming mostly irrelevant.
I think Sora 2 produced quite good videos, at least of a certain type. It was very good at producing convincing low-resolution cellphone footage. Unfortunately you had to have a very creative mind to get anything interesting out of it, as the copyright and content restrictions were a big "no fun allowed" clause, which contributed to its demise. Everything on the main Sora page was the same "cute animals doing something wholesome and unexpected" video.
My "favorite" part was how the post-generation checks would self-report. e.g. It was impossible to make a video of an angry chef with a British accent because Sora would always overfit it to Gordon Ramsey, and flag its own generated video after it was created!
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156 - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though partial credit goes to "movieslop".
> In February 2024, OpenAI previewed examples of its output to the public,[1] with the first generation of Sora released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in the US and Canada in December 2024[2][3] and the second generation, Sora 2, was released to select users in the US and Canada at the end of September 2025.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
So OpenAI has done the right thing as a startup here, gotten lots of training data, and observed lots of user behavior that they can now apply going forward.
The Sora models, on the other hand, aren’t going anywhere, and I believe OpenAI will continue to invest in them. They’re getting better and better, just like Google’s Veo, which is quite good at generating videos as well.
Using Codex and agent skills, it’s actually quite easy to generate a storyboard and then have a list of shots in that storyboard. Then generate videos from those storyboard stills, and then finally assemble those individual video files into a final movie file using something like ffmpeg. It's also very easy to create a voiceover with TTS and even simple music using ChatGPT Containers (aka the python tool).
This will 'democratize' (ha ha, for people with money obvi) a lot of video creation going forward. Against all wisdom, I am actually quite bullish on this technology, especially in the hands of young people. They are very creative and have lots of stories to share.
Necessary disclaimer as usual around the ethics of how these models were created: all the AI companies have totally ripped off artists in service of creating these models. I wish something would be done about that but I'm not holding my breath. No politician seems to want to touch it.
This may well be a needed reprioritization in the face of resource constraints, but it ain't a masterful Xanatos gambit.
Agree, and didn't intend to imply that. This is just a good startup move that gets a big headline because it's OpenAI. Other startups around the world do the same thing all the time.
I think OpenAI had a brief delusion that it could become some huge social networking app. The App was heavily modeled after TikTok..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE
Better for OAI to spend their human and compute resources on something else.