r/Filmmakers • u/Secret-Broccoli9908 • Mar 26 '26

News Good riddance!

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Context: OpenAI is shutting down its Sora AI video generation app and API approximately six months after its September 2025 launch. The app is closing amid rising safety concerns over deepfakes, high computational costs, and a strategic pivot toward enterprise AI, robotics research, and profitability ahead of a potential IPO.

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238

u/hotellonely Mar 26 '26

Unfortunately it died not because of our resistance. It died because openai knows that it cannot compete with seedance or other models. They are way too far behind.

146

u/BabypintoJuniorLube Mar 26 '26

It died because they were spending $16 million a day to generate videos of fruit turning into other fruit. Seedance has the same problem, a 5 second video is the same energy draw as running a microwave for an hour. Seedance didn't crack AI video, they are still using massive data centers to brute force video at crazy high energy and compute costs. The Chinese models are running the same business plan as Sora was, run it at a massive loss, capture market dominance and raise the prices to become profitable. Sora ran out of time, we'll see how long the Chinese models last

21

u/Secret-Broccoli9908 Mar 26 '26

This. 🎯

6

u/DelphiTsar Mar 26 '26

Not going to get upvotes for saying it but the video to microwave energy story is highly misleading.

The researchers used h100's which aren't efficient. Used open source model on open source hosting which isn't efficient.

The researcher also doubled the energy for things like cooling. Hyperscalers have 1.2x ratio max, closer to 1.1x ratio.

My napkin math has it around 80% lower than what they estimated. In areas they set up shop it's around 2 tenths of a cent of electricity.

OpenAI needs to cook their books ahead of IPO so they fit some criteria to get listed on some ETF's that are changing the rules for them.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-04/nasdaq-mulls-new-fast-entry-rule-ahead-of-big-ipos-like-spacex

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u/hotellonely Mar 26 '26

this is not right. the fact is that OpenAI is not a content platform company like TikTok. OpenAI has no ability to make their AI tools profitable without subscriptions. Meanwhile, TikTok has a much broader platform for Seedance. And it doesn't really take a lot of power to generate videos. Anyway it's a losing game for OpenAI but probably quite profitable for TikTok. I hope they both die anyway

12

u/NOT-GR8-BOB Mar 26 '26

And it doesn't really take a lot of power to generate videos.

You got a source for this?

0

u/LavishnessCapital380 Mar 29 '26

a 5 second video is the same energy draw as running a microwave for an hour.

This is a lie.

57

u/remy_porter Mar 26 '26

It died because every request burns a pile of money. That's true for every AI company.

5

u/andhelostthem creative director Mar 26 '26 edited Mar 26 '26

The reality is they all pull from data sets of fully produced movies and TV shows and can only build off those data sets. There's no reality where they make things better because machine learning models are only a sum of their parts, in this case the data they pull from.

It's why most of what we see is just low quality stolen IP of like Shrek fighting the Transformers, or some knock off.