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       COMMENT PAGE FOR:
 (HTM)   Goodbye to Sora
       
       
        MrTomatoes wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
        It's a shame they're closing it, but luckily it won't be a brainrot,
        but it's still a shame.
       
        JohannesCortez wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
        Was Sora even profitable in the first place?
       
        timosterhus wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
        After seeing SeeDance generate multiple sequences of correct-looking
        hand-to-hand fight choreography, I'm more surprised they didn't take
        Sora down sooner.
       
        chrysoprace wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
        Hopefully this means less misinformation and slop on social media, but
        maybe that's just wishful thinking.
       
        mcs_ wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
        I’ve never tried it, do you think I’m missing something? If yes,
        what has it brought into your life? Was it just entertainment?
       
        semiinfinitely wrote 1 day ago:
        YEET
       
        dalvrosa wrote 1 day ago:
        What are the best replacements?
       
        theropost wrote 1 day ago:
        I'm a bit sad.. I was using it quite often for making quick videos for
        Teams instead of using Meme's and Gifs.. I just made my own :(
       
        p0w3n3d wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
          ynx0 wrote 1 day ago:
          I think that it’s better that everyone collectively realize that
          video is no longer default-trustworthy in a widespread manner, if the
          alternative would have been the public finding out only after a long
          cycle of misuse by high-level actors and subsequent whistleblowing à
          la PRISM/Snowden.
       
            p0w3n3d wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
            however the forensic or semi-forensic tools should be given to
            people to help them verify the videos. On the other hand I suspect
            that these tools are not released so wrongdoers are not able to
            test their fakes against the tools (security by obscurity)
       
        Halian wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddance to bad garbage.
       
        KevinMS wrote 1 day ago:
        Its looking like Michael Jackson stealing KFC will be the peak of AI
       
        sceptic123 wrote 1 day ago:
        translation: "we got all the data we needed"
       
        glass1122 wrote 1 day ago:
        One of the best news after a long time, LOL!! Sooner or later expecting
        more good news from all these AI slops and BS. RIP My Friend. never
        used SORA or even visited the website. LOL!!
       
        whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        qqxufo1 wrote 1 day ago:
        OpenAI pivoting to B2B and coding makes sense, but it leaves a massive
        vacuum in consumer video. ByteDance simply integrating better
        generative models directly into CapCut will easily capture all those
        users.
       
        eigenvalue wrote 1 day ago:
        I posted this on X but it’s relevant here, so reposting it:
        
        I had a lot of fun using Sora and got a lot of laughs with absurd
        videos of me in various situations.
        
        But like everyone else, I kind of got it out of my system after a
        couple weeks. Not to mention that my family got sick of seeing them.
        And so my usage collapsed to zero. And that seems to have also been the
        pattern writ large.
        
        But this kind of flash-in-the-pan dynamic is devastating for a product
        with this kind of profile, which requires insane amounts of compute
        hardware to serve while also having no short-term monetization path.
        
        Meta could afford to invest in IG Reels even when it was burning money
        and costing them a fortune for hardware because it was building up what
        turned out to be sustainable usage patterns which persisted long after
        the initial spending ramp.
        
        It’s basically impossible to effectively monetize anything that’s
        not sustainable on the order of multiple years.
        
        A subscription-based model would see excessively high churn that would
        be ruinous to the economics, and also advertisers wouldn’t be
        interested either, for the obvious reasons.
        
        So why couldn’t this work? I don’t think that it was because the
        models weren’t good enough or that the depictions weren’t realistic
        or lifelike enough. I still marvel at some of the better outputs I was
        able to get from Sora.
        
        I think the fundamental problem that Sora faced is actually much
        broader and more general, and it comes down to the basic Pareto math of
        any content generation or creative app, which is that 95%+ of the users
        just want to passively consume content from the 5% or less that
        actually wants to generate it (and is capable of making anything that
        other people want to watch).
        
        It was really dismal to see the repetitive, trite ideas that 99% of
        users generated in the public feed. Just the same few dumb jokes and
        things they copied from other users.
        
        Or putting themselves in a scene with their favorite fictional or
        cartoon characters or whatever, which of course got banned pretty
        quickly for copyright issues.
        
        Most people are not creative and don’t have a lot of original,
        interesting ideas. So that means that the vast majority of the content
        is always going to come from a vanishingly small number of creators in
        a power law distribution.
        
        And those super-creators aren’t going to want to be limited to a
        simple text-based interface that can only generate for 10 seconds at a
        time with no continuity and where large portions of things you might
        want to try are strictly forbidden.
        
        They’ll instead gravitate to more customized solutions for power
        users that regular users would find as overwhelming to use as AutoCAD.
        
        And that’s what you’re seeing now with all the new viral AI slop
        videos that are made by a handful of creators who have figured out the
        workflows and are pumping out the worst junk you can imagine that gets
        people to click and watch.
        
        Anyway, RIP Sora; it was fun while it lasted. Thanks, Sam, for blowing
        a few hundred million bucks so we could get some laughs.
       
        nighwatch wrote 1 day ago:
        With Sora stepping back like this, it seems like the perfect opening
        for ByteDance to step in and capture the market with Seedance 2.
       
        imadch wrote 1 day ago:
        What a decision , maybe it's not profitable or they are preparing for
        something big ? i don't think OpenAI will lose like this
       
        softwaredoug wrote 1 day ago:
        Was Sora just a honeypot to get a media company (ie Disney) to invest a
        lot of money into OpenAI?
        
        Maybe it achieved its objective?
       
          nemomarx wrote 1 day ago:
          As far as I can tell Disney didn't actually hand over the money yet.
          They were still in preparation and it's cancelled now obviously.
          
          So whatever reason they say to shut this down, it was more important
          than 1B investment.
       
        endofreach wrote 1 day ago:
        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…
       
        epolanski wrote 1 day ago:
        Off Topic: I paid 100 $ for Dall-E 2 credits back in the pre chatgpt
        days.
        
        Then they killed Dall-E 2 and my credits vaporized.
        
        Anybody found themselves in the same situation? What have you done?
       
        christianqchung wrote 1 day ago:
        I was extremely impressed by the sora demo in Feb 2024, but there are
        exactly two videos I remember ever seeing from AI video gen services
        that will stick around in my mind: the one where realistic spongebob
        drives away from a cop, and Harry Potter Balenciaga (2026). The
        original sora launch seemed pretty boring to me as a non-creative, so I
        only gave it a few shots (in the early semi-failed original interface).
        I never tried the sora 2 app since I don't like shortform video.
        
        Disinfo AI videos and the Coca Cola Christmas ad have also really
        soured my expectation of genuinely positive creative uses of video gen
        for the next couple years until more improvements are made, and I start
        seeing stuff go viral for being good instead of just being weird. I am
        still surprised that sora never had the grok problem of generating csam
        or seemingly anything along those lines.
       
        siliconc0w wrote 1 day ago:
        I'm hoping a side effect of AI Slop in that by increasing volume it
        decreases value and people eventually start finding all Internet slop
        less compelling.
       
        nnevatie wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddance.
       
        malbs wrote 1 day ago:
        Conspiratorial thought - did OpenAI shut down Sora because one of their
        models started attaching it's weights to all the output videos, and
        some how escaped the farm? Not an original thought, "If Anyone Builds
        it, Everyone Dies" authors proposed this is an option for an AI to
        escape the sandbox. lol. Imagine.
       
        Marazan wrote 1 day ago:
        Well, gotta hand it to the haters on this one.
       
        vivzkestrel wrote 1 day ago:
        - gary marcus is going to have a field day with this one
       
        asim wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
          Gooblebrai wrote 22 hours 32 min ago:
          > 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?
       
            mitkebes wrote 22 hours 18 min ago:
            A growing business right now is using AI art for product images for
            Amazon/etc listings. There are lots of ComfyUI workflows for it,
            you put in a picture of the product, some photos of people, and it
            can spit out images of the people wearing it.
            
            Many product images are currently done through photoshop/etc, but
            this is quicker and can look more realistic.
            
            It may not accurately represent how the product will actually look
            when worn, but that's not the seller's primary concern.
       
          WarcrimeActual wrote 1 day ago:
          >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.
       
          QuantumGood wrote 1 day ago:
          > "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.
       
            marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
            Bubbles either inflate or pop...
            
            But I'm not sure we would even notice nowadays. It used to be a
            disaster that could take people's attention for years, but
            currently, it may get lost in the noise.
       
          muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
            heavyset_go wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
            This is a pipe dream, models are mistake machines and agents are
            mistake amplifiers.
            
            This only "works" for toy projects, things that don't really matter
            and nothing that can cost you business, money, clients or time.
       
              muskstinks wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
              There are two ways and all of it in context of billions of
              dollars the richest companies in the world are investing with the
              smartest people working on it.
              
              These big companies want to see whats going to happen with more
              parameters and are already quite deep in it. So that momentum
              will push us easily through 2026 and nothing will collapse in
              2027 just because.
              
              So we will see if we hit a hard plateu or not, i do not see any
              plateu at all. I see constant progress on every single front,
              faster models, faster inferencing, etc.
              
              I also see the biggest reinforcement loop we ever have created by
              a small amount of companies getting real human feedback every
              single day by saying things like thanks, thumbs up/down, or
              "thats wrong", "i meant x not y" etc.
              
              And there are plenty of ways of doing a transition from 100%
              human to 100% agents. Like feedback loops, human in the loop,
              human approval for critical steps, etc.
              
              And i think we will continue spending time and energy working at
              these problems in the future and no longer on just reimplementing
              the same crud application.
       
            short_sells_poo wrote 1 day ago:
            I see where you are going with this, but IMO this is not a
            technical problem but a legal problem.
            
            Who will be held responsible when an AI agent messes up the HR
            system and the company is exposed to losses due to a mistake? Who
            is going to be responsible when your SEO agent overspends?
            
            Ultimately, it's going to be you most likely, because I can't see
            AI firms taking this responsibility.
            
            You might argue that right now it also falls on the employer, since
            employees are rarely held responsible for genuine mistakes, even if
            it ends in disaster, however you have a lot of agency over what an
            employee is doing. Their motivation is generally correlated with
            doing well, because past success ensures future career growth.
            
            An AI agent has no such incentives. The AI company will just charge
            you some minimal fee to provide the service, and if it messes up,
            will wash their hands of responsibility and tell you that you
            should've been more careful in using it.
            
            I dislike Taleb for various reasons, but using AI agents is
            basically the definition of a fragile system. It works 99% of the
            time, lulling people into this sense of security where they can
            just offload all their work very conveniently. And then 1% of the
            time (or 0.01% of the time), it ends in utter disaster, which
            people are very bad at dealing with.
       
              muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
              I think it will move most critical due dilligence to the tools /
              HR system themselves.
              
              Encoding more rules, more precise rules and alerting a human in
              case it thinks its off. Like salary increase by 20% gets flagged
              automatically. Revenue drop bey x % too.
              
              It could even go so far that the maker of these systems will
              insure you for their use.
              
              It just needs to be cheaper than all the humans in the loop and
              if you train it once, you can copy it unlimited time. Scaling
              effect of software for tasks we need to train a human again and
              again.
              
              It could also be agent systems which do this. Like a company
              building and designing the HR USA Healthcare agent specialized in
              SAP HR. Another one for HR Brazil Healthcare agent specialized in
              another HR software.
              
              Humans are really expensive and you have to train them regularly
              and every single on of them.
       
          empath75 wrote 1 day ago:
          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_.
       
          k__ wrote 1 day ago:
          "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.
       
            aenis wrote 22 hours 22 min ago:
            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.
       
            moduspol wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
            asim wrote 1 day ago:
            Well tbh I think it's like cloud in 2007-2009. I was highly
            skeptical and heckling while running on managed bare metal
            everytime there was an outage. But now cloud is the standard model
            for anything really. And I think AI becomes the gold standard for
            code in the long term. So yea right now lots of outages. In a
            couple years it'll be much better. And in ten years people will
            always default to automation via AI.
       
            Bombthecat wrote 1 day ago:
            Fake Support contact from companies is another use case. They send
            you in endless useless circles until you give up.
            
            Saves the company a ton of money
       
              seanw444 wrote 1 day ago:
              The level to which this stuff can be used against the common
              person is truly astounding.
       
            alcasa wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
              nine_k wrote 18 hours 47 min ago:
              It's the opposite, it becomes economically viable to produce
              tailor-made software for more narrow purposes. Coding becomes
              cheaper, resources free up for adjusting to the customer's
              problem more precisely.
       
                rixed wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
                The same could have been said from the sewing machine.
       
                  nine_k wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
                  Correct, various alteration services have been made much more
                  affordable by the sewing machine.
       
              renegade-otter wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
              This has been the story for over a decade. Thins are easier. The
              cloud, more CPU, more RAM. No one really pays attention to
              performance, detail, and the little things. There is no craft in
              anything - just FEATURES.
              
              AI will just make this so much worse - a race to the bottom of
              dull mediocrity.
       
              mandevil wrote 1 day ago:
              Yeah but buying a sofa from Ikea doesn't let people steal my
              banking passwords. There are serious consequences to software
              bugs that there aren't in cheaper ready-made clothing.
       
                lalalandland wrote 1 day ago:
                Side point, but clothing industry are some of the biggest
                pollutors in the world
       
              runarberg wrote 1 day ago:
              Your analogy is one indirection from being a fit. Factories
              usually get custom solutions for their production facilities,
              tailor made by specialist engineers. They then run the production
              and deliver mass produced goods to the markets. We software
              engineers aren’t delivering tailor made solutions straight to
              the consumer markets. We are much more like the engineers who set
              up the machinery in the production facility, and our software is
              much closer to that machinery then it is to the mass produced
              table you buy at Ikea.
       
              k__ wrote 1 day ago:
              Fair.
              
              I just have the feeling that it doesn't get the job done anymore.
              
              I hope we will see the rise of alternatives.
       
              Bombthecat wrote 1 day ago:
              Yeah, someone wrote: the future of apps, one user, me
       
          superultra wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
            everforward wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
            > They just want their invoicing system to just f-ing work for a
            change.
            
            Time will tell, but I'm dubious this will hold longer-term.  I
            don't doubt that Claude can write the code, but I am dubious Claude
            can manage it sanely.  Does it have backups?  Does the guy that
            wrote it know how to restore those, or can Claude do it?  Can
            Claude upgrade the backend and/or migrate the data when the backend
            changes, or is this going to be running known CVEs in a month?
            
            This has sort of always been a thing via hiring CS students as
            interns.  I don't doubt most of them could jam out something that
            looks like Slack or Gmail.  The problems aren't apparent
            immediately, they become apparent when you realize it doesn't
            handle invalid responses well and the backups are hosed so you just
            lost a bunch of data.
       
            pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
            I'm converging on this as the real end state: it's a "better Excel"
            for general business work. And has some of the same limitations -
            maintainability and security. But there are also plenty of small
            businesses that run off a shared Excel spreadsheet and a few
            mailboxes.
            
            Nobody ever really solved making CRUD apps easier through better
            frameworks. So now we have a tool to spit out framework gunk, and
            suddenly everyone can have their own app.
       
            elevation wrote 1 day ago:
            > caveat emperor
            
            s/emperor/emptor
            
            I hope your friend's company spends $20K to harden the deployment
            of the new app so it doesn't become a deep liability.
       
              superultra wrote 1 day ago:
              thanks for the correction
              
              I hear you but at least as my bud described it, the software that
              most of the timber mill industry uses is buggy as hell, crashes
              all the time, and makes mistakes. One would wonder if even the
              licensed software is hardened.
       
              windexh8er wrote 1 day ago:
              Keep dreaming!
              
              The best part is is that they'll get popped because of it and
              have zero clue.  Anyone building in any frontier provider
              currently, but has little background in software, is creating all
              kinds of new liabilities that didn't exist before.
              
              In a school district where I live the IT department developed a
              password distribution app using Gemini on Google App Script (they
              didn't even need this part), sent out links with B64 encoded JSON
              that included: student name, student email, parent email and
              student password.  Yet, when I found it and told them all the
              ways that it was technically a breach in our state they ran to
              their 2-bit "cyber security experts" and "legal". They were far
              more concerned with CYA than understanding the hole they dug
              themselves. And all of the advice they got back was that it
              wasn't a breach. They claimed their DPA with Google protected
              them. I explained how email works and they just ignored me,
              likely because in our state they are bound by GDPA and won't ever
              engage in a legitimate conversation via email.
              
              The kicker here is they pay for an IDP with built-in mechanisms
              for password resets (that was the reason for building this: to
              reset students passwords).  One of their cyber security "experts"
              (a lone guy who has zero credentials from what I found) told them
              that password resets using the IDP was "not recommended". When
              pressed on that they were, again, silent.
              
              LLMs are creating a huge mess for people now empowered to go well
              beyond their capabilities and understanding. It's a second coming
              of the golden age of shitty software that's riddled with even the
              most basic of security flaws.
       
                superultra wrote 1 day ago:
                I think this is where a lot of freelance contractors could
                pivot to - basically "last mile" coding, where the LLM does the
                front end work, and then high hourly pay engineers come in and
                fix the work. it'd still be cheaper than a lot of the industry
                niche software that is usually pretty bad.
       
                seanw444 wrote 1 day ago:
                I'm just going to keep building software mostly traditionally,
                while using "AI" to help me research things quicker (might as
                well use it while it's here), survive the shitpocalypse, and
                then laugh as traditional-minded developers become a scarce
                sought-after resource again.
                
                Either way, the instability of this industry due to the insane
                amounts of cargo culting every time  comes along has made me
                really question whether I want to stick around.
       
                  heavyset_go wrote 23 hours 36 min ago:
                  > Either way, the instability of this industry due to the
                  insane amounts of cargo culting every time  comes along has
                  made me really question whether I want to stick around.
                  
                  Whatever you do, don't click this link:
                  
 (HTM)            [1]: https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/
       
          whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
          >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.
       
          Tade0 wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
       
            WarmWash wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
              KellyCriterion wrote 3 hours 1 min ago:
              Thats also the case today:
              
              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.)
       
              KptMarchewa wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
              I find it a bit amazing that we're all still able to work
              somehow, when surrounding with all those distractions.
       
              armenarmen wrote 15 hours 34 min ago:
              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.
              
              But yeah, scrolling short form is crack
       
              ifethereal wrote 1 day ago:
              Can anyone come up with a citation for this?
              
              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.
       
                petethomas wrote 1 day ago:
                Probably this
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.15...
       
                Terretta wrote 1 day ago:
                It's a particularly misleading anecdote.
                
                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
       
                  mlok wrote 1 day ago:
                  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.
       
                    randycupertino wrote 22 hours 12 min ago:
                    > 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.
       
              ghurtado wrote 1 day ago:
              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.
       
                andai wrote 1 day ago:
                In the 19th century, many authors lamented the frantic,
                unhealthy pace of modern life.
       
                  sahildeepreel wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
                  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..
                  
 (HTM)            [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_D...
       
                    ProllyInfamous wrote 3 hours 5 min ago:
                    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.
       
                  aenis wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
                  And boy, were they right.
       
                  dpflan wrote 1 day ago:
                  “The world is too much with us”
                  - W. Wordsworth
                  
                  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.
                  
 (HTM)            [1]: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45564/the-wor...
       
                Tade0 wrote 1 day ago:
                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.
       
          cube00 wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
       
          mark_l_watson wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
            Bombthecat wrote 1 day ago:
            Claude runs now on Google tpus...
       
          rdevilla wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
          
          Nothing is new under the sun.
       
          Hendrikto wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
       
            hobofan wrote 1 day ago:
            Frontier model developers don't make money, but inference providers
            do. For open weight models there is a healthy market of inference
            providers that operate profitably without VC backing.
       
              lossyalgo wrote 1 day ago:
              Such as? Where do we find these open weight model providers? Why
              is hardly anyone talking about them or sharing links (here or
              elsewhere) if they are so wonderful and profitable?
       
                vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
                Why is hardly anyone talking about basic web hosting provides
                or sharung links (here or elsewhere) if they are so wonderful
                and profitable?
                
                Because few people really care much about the commodity hosting
                world. They're not making waves, they're just packaging things
                made by others for a low-ish cost. They're also not very
                consumer-focused, as they're a bit lower level than what most
                people prefer to think about. It doesn't mean they don't exist
                or that they're not profitable though, just not
                headline-reaching numbers in the end.
       
                rescbr wrote 1 day ago:
                Go to [1] and you're going to see plenty of providers.
                
                OpenRouter makes it easy to use them, just add credits to your
                account.
                
                I thought this was common knowledge to anyone looking to use an
                inference API, but it seems it isn't. Well, even AWS is in this
                business with Bedrock.
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://models.dev/
       
              wildster wrote 1 day ago:
              CoreWeave's cash flow do not look too healthy.
       
            azan_ wrote 1 day ago:
            Not because there is no path to profitability (they make a ton of
            money on inference), they just spend a lot on R&D.
       
              chasd00 wrote 1 day ago:
              from what i understand, the issue with inference is it doesn't
              scale as user count grows the way traditional saas scales. In
              typical saas adding users requires very little additional
              capacity. However with inference, supporting more users requires
              much more capacity to be added. I don't know if it's quite linear
              but it certainly requires more infrastructure to support
              additional LLM users than say a web application.
       
                seanw444 wrote 1 day ago:
                And the existing infrastructure routinely struggles for several
                of the well known players. You can literally tell when it's
                getting bogged down by workload. And that's after all the
                absurdly large datacenters we've already established at
                significant expense (to both the corporations and the average
                person).
       
              root_axis wrote 1 day ago:
              > they make a ton of money on inference
              
              So it is stated, but is it actually true? I am not convinced.
              
              Besides, it's not as if they can suddenly stop training models,
              the moment you do that you've spelled a death sentence for
              profitablity because Google and open source will very quickly
              undercut a 15 year break even timeline.
       
                extr wrote 1 day ago:
                It's widely reported and acknowledged as true.
       
                  Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
                  Where and by who? Critical context missing here.
       
                    extr wrote 23 hours 19 min ago:
                    Dario Amodei @ 18:05
                    
 (HTM)              [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcqQ1ebBqkc&t=1088...
       
                      Forgeties79 wrote 22 hours 8 min ago:
                      The CEO hyping his product and the viability of his
                      business during an interview with Stripe does not, at
                      least to me, qualify as “widely reported and
                      acknowledged”
       
                  root_axis wrote 1 day ago:
                  Well, the only people with any ability to acknowledge it have
                  a massive incentive to do so, and I've been around the block
                  enough times to know that startups will use every trick in
                  the book to paint a rosy financial picture, even when it's
                  extremely misleading or occasionally just straight up lies.
                  In the current climate of AI hype my skepticism is even
                  greater.
                  
                  I'll believe it when I see it.
       
                steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                Agreed, the revenues are big.. but very small next to the
                datacenter bills.. even if a fraction of which are being used
                for inference, it's hard to argue they even break even.  That's
                before all the other costs (Super Bowl ads, billions in
                compensation).
       
              aaa_aaa wrote 1 day ago:
              Not really. They are burning money on hardware, resources and
              payroll without meaningful  return prospects.
       
              mrbungie wrote 1 day ago:
              Afaik Anthropic still loses money for their main product in this
              space: Claude Code and their Max plans.
       
                somehnguy wrote 1 day ago:
                This became immediately clear to me over the weekend when I
                used Opus via API key. I had it review the code for my
                (relatively small) personal blog to create an AGENTS.MD - it
                cost me $3.26.
       
                  TheLNL wrote 1 day ago:
                  Api cost need not correlate with running cost.
       
                  bsaul wrote 1 day ago:
                  same here... The API costs are absolutely insane for any real
                  usage. This is either high prices to make sure no profitable
                  competitor to claude workspace or other agent system emerges,
                  or heavily sponsoring of their own soluions.
       
            jvictor118 wrote 1 day ago:
            With coding (it's not really coding per se that matters imo it's
            more like dynamic logic writ large) it's a land grab strategy. They
            want to get established as the de facto standard and get a whole
            bunch of people on their platform so by the time they need to "get
            profitable" they have a captive audience, a leg-up on other labs.
            It's a tale as old as time, that's why ubers used to be cheaper
            than cost.
       
              fooqux wrote 1 day ago:
              > They want to get established as the de facto standard and get a
              whole bunch of people on their platform so by the time they need
              to "get profitable" they have a captive audience, a leg-up on
              other labs. It's a tale as old as time, that's why ubers used to
              be cheaper than cost.
              
              Some of that is seeking to kill competitors before they can get
              established. That's normal and has been around for generations,
              if not since trading was invented.
              
              But most of what we've seen during the "enshitification age" has
              been to burn money until you achieve a critical mass of users.
              However, this only really applies to social platforms where the
              point of it is communicating with people you know. That's the
              lock-in. You convinced Grandma to join Bookface and now you feel
              bad leaving if she doesn't leave at the same time, and more
              importantly, who wants to join Google Square if nobody else uses
              it?
              
              That's not going to work for AI platforms.
              
              What I do see potentially working is one method that email
              platforms use to lock in users: having tons of data you can't
              export/migrate. If you spent lots of time training your AI by
              feeding it your data, that's going to make it harder to leave.
              
              So far none of them have capitalized on this (probably due to
              various technical reasons) but I expect it to start eventually.
       
                friendzis wrote 1 day ago:
                The lock-in of email platforms is the address. With IMAP you
                can extract the messages right away and migrate. Yet, you would
                still have to check the old mailbox for stray emails that you
                must tell to reach you on the new address. And continue doing
                so for years or risk missing some critical email.
                
                Coincidentally, bringing your own address that can be migrates
                away is somewhere between impossible and expensive.
       
                  juped wrote 1 day ago:
                  No, you can do it on all the major providers for either no or
                  low cost.
       
                    friendzis wrote 1 day ago:
                    Disregarding the grandfathered free accounts, own domain is
                    $7.20/user/month on gmail, €5/month on Proton. On
                    microsoft that's business tier feature and AFAIK not
                    supported at all on Yahoo.
       
                      vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
                      Zoho Mail Lite is $1/user/mo when billed annually. [1] A
                      few DNS hosting companies still bundle in a few free
                      email mailboxes with registration costs but that is
                      becoming more rare.
                      
 (HTM)                [1]: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
       
              bryanlarsen wrote 1 day ago:
              It's a strategy as old as time, but it's a strategy that usually
              fails.     Spending a lot of money on customer capture only works
              when customers are actually solidly captured.    Most markets have
              fairly heavy competition and customers will only stay captured as
              long as there is no substantial cost to staying captive.
              
              Take Uber as an example:  yes they've raised prices to become
              profitable, but not to the insanely profitable levels they could
              if they had a true monopoly.   People will stay on Uber when the
              competition is still at a roughly equivalent price, but will
              switch if Uber raises its prices enough.
              
              Uber Eats is different, since its a 3 sided market where the cost
              is paid by the restaurant rather than the user.
              
              AI appears it's going to be more like Uber the car service.  
              Claude can charge $200/month, but charging $2000/month seems
              unlikely to work.   I'm sure many would be willing to pay
              $2000/month if they had no alternative, but there are
              alternatives.
       
                ghurtado wrote 1 day ago:
                > it's a strategy as old as time, but it's a strategy that
                usually fails
                
                I like to call this the "Yahoo Effect"
       
            steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
            Yes
            They are just pivoting to stuff that loses money more slowly but
            maybe has a path to profits eventually…
       
              heavyset_go wrote 1 day ago:
              Some of these AI companies that promised AGI are going to find
              out that they're actually IDE plugin subscription companies
       
                Bombthecat wrote 1 day ago:
                Nvidia CEO said we already have agi:)
       
                  steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                  Ad generated income
       
                WarmWash wrote 1 day ago:
                Coding is a small minority of total generated tokens. It's easy
                swimming in tech waters all day to think Claude is the pack
                leader because it writes excellent code, but the reality is
                that tokens are overwhelmingly coming from OpenAI and Google
                doing mostly stuff like "Make this e-mail sound nicer" and
                "What's a cheap vacation spot with warm turquoise waters"
       
                  steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                  > "Make this e-mail sound nicer" and "What's a cheap vacation
                  spot with warm turquoise waters"
                  
                  Right but I think a lot of these use cases aren't replacing
                  any jobs because it wasn't anyones job.  It's just a little
                  polish on existing work (did spell correction in Word kill
                  jobs?) or the stuff that voice assistants have been promising
                  for 10 years.
       
                    vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
                    Both of those things both were and are jobs. They're called
                    secretaries and travel agents.
       
                      steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                      Jobs that have already been killed is my point
       
                        vel0city wrote 1 day ago:
                        Together that's about four million American jobs so I'd
                        disagree those jobs have "already been killed".
       
                steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                I think it remains to be seen if LLMs are even 25% as good at
                everything else as they are at coding.. which is fine, if they
                focus and stop promising the world.
                
                That alone is huge, if they let go of their egos about putting
                the entire white collar class out of work..
       
          biztos wrote 1 day ago:
          We could argue all day about what should be at the forefront, but
          addictive content isn't going anywhere, because addicts pay up.
          
          In this case, maybe not enough to offset the costs; or maybe it just
          wasn't addictive enough.  But it's still early days.
       
            muvlon wrote 1 day ago:
            > because addicts pay up.
            
            I think it turns out they don't, not really anyway. And that's
            exactly why Sora is dead. They figured out that addictive AI slop
            has been so thoroughly commoditized that you can get it on a ton of
            other platforms for free, so people don't want to pay for it.
       
              asveikau wrote 1 day ago:
              The monetization of social media has always been about steering
              otherwise non paying users into making purchases elsewhere. So if
              the AI slop can make people spend money on other products that's
              accomplished the goal.
       
              burningChrome wrote 1 day ago:
              >>  you can get it on a ton of other platforms for free, so
              people don't want to pay for it.
              
              What happens when other platforms start trying to get people to
              pay? I think there's a race to find a revenue stream for this
              stuff. As soon as one company can find a way to monetize it, 
              they'll all end up doing it. Right now, we're in a place where
              companies are losing so much money, they have to decide how much
              they can lose before they pull the plug.
              
              OpenAI just proved you cannot burn money indefinitely.
       
              mark_l_watson wrote 1 day ago:
              Sometimes they do pay up. Google Gemini estimates that 25% of
              active daily YouTube users pay for ad free service. I know my
              wife and I do, and we watch a huge range of YouTube material more
              hours a month than all the other streaming services we subscribe
              to. There is no area of human knowledge or human interest that
              YouTube doesn’t have a ton of material for; and of course, the
              animal videos… The ironic thing in the subject of Sora service
              being cancelled is that neither my wife or I watch AI generated
              material.
       
              jsharpe wrote 1 day ago:
              I think the real answer is that Sora-style AI slop videos just
              aren't as addictive as we thought they'd be.
              
              I let my kids have access to the app in the hope they would be
              inoculated against being obsessed with AI video and it actually
              worked. They got bored in like 2 days.
              
              It simply doesn't compare well with handcrafted short form videos
              that are already plentiful on TikTok (which I absolutely don't
              let my kids watch).
       
                steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                Yes, fortunately slop is pretty unwatchable after the novelty
                wears out.  Even the lowest common denominator stuff NFLX
                churns out is in a different league.
                
                I was talking to other people re: difference between code &
                other domains.    Code is, for customer, what it does.. not how
                it does it.  That is - we can get mad about style, idioms,
                frameworks, language, indentation, linting, verbosity,
                readability, maintainability but.. it doesn't really matter for
                the customer if the code does the thing its supposed to do.
                
                Many things like entertainment products don't work that way. 
                For a good book/movie/show, a good plot (the what) is table
                stakes.  All of the how matters - dialogue, writing style,
                casting, camera/sound/lighting work, directing, pacing, sound
                track, editing, etc.
                
                For short format low stakes stuff like online ads, then the AI
                slop actually probably works however.
                
                Same for say making a power point.  LLMs can quickly spit out a
                passable deck I am sure.  For a lot of BS job use cases, that's
                actually probably fine.
                But if it is the key element of a sales pitch, really it's just
                advanced auto-formatting/complete, and the human element is
                still the most important part.    For example I doubt all the AI
                startups are using AI generated sales pitches when they go to
                VC for funding.
       
                  neutronicus wrote 1 day ago:
                  IMO slop fits best for "art that isn't the point".
                  
                  A promotional flyer for an event could work perfectly well in
                  plain text. The art is pure social signal - this event is
                  thrown by the type of people who put art in a certain style
                  on their flyers. Your eye is caught and your brain almost
                  immediately discards the art.
                  
                  Same with power point - you make a power point so that
                  everyone knows this decision was made by the type of people
                  who make power points. A txt file and a png would have gotten
                  the job done.
                  
                  Same also with memes - you could just _say_ a lot of these
                  jokes, but they're funnier with a hastily-edited image
                  alongside.
       
                    steveBK123 wrote 1 day ago:
                    Agreed, it's good at placeholder art for which
                    entertainment consumption is not the point.  Clip Art for
                    the new generation.
       
          muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
            Hendrikto wrote 1 day ago:
            It never made sense and was always just burning resources that
            OpenAI does not have.
            
            It reeks so much of desperation. They know they are running out of
            goodwill and money at breakneck speed. They are just flailing and
            throwing shit against the wall to see if anything sticks.
       
              muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
              Everyone is doing image generation. Its realtivly easy and I
              would say it would be a people mover if openai wouldn't support
              this.
              
              So they need to be able to do image generation, for which they
              need image data. They also need to be able to analyze videos for
              more and better training data like learning or teaching there
              models from yt and other sources.
              
              So they have image generation, image dataset and video dataset.
              Its not far fetched ata ll or desperate to leverage this base for
              playing around with video generation.
              
              And despite how much money they burn, for a company that size,
              trying out video generation wasn't that high of a goal post.
              
              I'm really surprised by there move and can only imagine that the
              progress of other models from google and antrophic pulls their
              teeth and no longer want to invest the compute (not money) to
              leverage their compute for their main models.
       
                Bombthecat wrote 1 day ago:
                Oh yeah. Openai didn't have a major image update in a while,
                no?
       
                  muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
                  Their latest model is from December but tbh i have not heard
                  much about it.
                  
                  Nano Banana created a lot of noise.
                  
                  But the reasoning of Gemini 3.1 Pro is really really good.
                  Its hard to describe how good it became. I do not see the
                  same quality from openai. Openai though is also super fast in
                  response. A lot faster than just a few month ago.
                  
                  For example: some german guy used the wrong word in
                  describing an advantage of having a silencer and missuesd a
                  word. Openai just said its nonsense, gemini suggested that
                  its a typo and he wanted to write something else (gemini was
                  correct).
                  
                  It could also be that we are in a moat between "why is AGI
                  not here yet" and "we need to build now the agentic platform
                  stuff, that takes time".
                  
                  Gemini pro is def slower than openai and I do not know if its
                  because I use the pro version of gemini but not from openai.
                  But it could also be that OpenAI has to work on subagents
                  because Gemini def uses subagents and i was not able to find
                  a source that OpenAI is doing this too.
       
        weezing wrote 1 day ago:
        Nothing of value was lost.
       
        wiseowise wrote 1 day ago:
        First domino falls?
       
        shevy-java wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        cmiles8 wrote 1 day ago:
        It was fun, but from a business standpoint I’d have to think this was
        a giant pile of burning cash for OpenAI… even more so than the rest
        of OpenAI at the moment
       
        r0ckarong wrote 1 day ago:
        Couldn't make it work at taking actual directions huh?
       
        janilowski wrote 1 day ago:
        From the linked Hollywood reporter article:
        
        "...the AI company exits the video generation business."
        
        "OpenAI, led by CEO Sam Altman, is not getting out of the AI video
        business [...], of course... "
        
        I hate journalism.
       
        delis-thumbs-7e wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddance. Less slop machines the better.
       
        mb194dc wrote 1 day ago:
        Burning $15m a day. It was impossible for it to ever be profitable.
        Reminds of tech bubble 1.
       
        bbayer wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        claytonia wrote 1 day ago:
        I’m just wondering whether the real reason behind this is the cost of
        supporting the model and service, or competition from players like
        Seedance.
       
          HerbManic wrote 1 day ago:
          I suspect it is a combnation of both. When OpenAI goes for the IPO
          all their costs become visible and this could hurt their vaulation
          big time.
          
          If it cost too much and others can do it cheaper, that looks bad from
          both fronts.
       
        steveharing1 wrote 1 day ago:
        Nowadays its strange that you put in a lot of efforts on a platform
        just to see these Goodbye messages, first digg was gone & now Sora.
       
        ulfw wrote 1 day ago:
        That company is run about as well as Loopt
       
        systemsweird wrote 1 day ago:
        I suspect the issue was Sora likely had a very low ratio of consumers
        to creators which makes a route to monetization unlikely. There was no
        incentives for doom scrolling consumers to migrate to Sora when they
        were already getting plenty of short form videos on FB, IG, and TikTok.
        
        The network effects of the other two platforms are too strong, and a
        value prop of “watch similar videos but they’re all AI” is not
        strong for consumers.
        
        Also, say what you want about AI slop, but I was on sora a lot for a
        few weeks and there was a real explosion of creativity on there. It
        felt new and exciting and creators were engaging with each other and
        sharing feedback and tips. I generated a ton of videos and surprised
        myself with a flury of creative  ideas.
       
        tabs_or_spaces wrote 1 day ago:
        I think Sora was technically impressive as a concept. The way it was
        managed as a product wasn't good.
        
        There didn't seem to be any marketing for it. Like I can't even
        remember an ad for it or any content creator type of person pushing
        Sora actively.
        
        To get access to Sora I believe you needed to be on a paid plan?
        
        It's really difficult to get user generated content going when it's
        behind a paywall.
        
        It's also hard to tell if this means that openai is in trouble, or if
        this is just a badly managed product that deserved to be killed. With
        the negative sentiment on openai, folks might think the former.
       
        StarterPro wrote 1 day ago:
        So long and good riddance.
       
        hnlyman wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        daikon899 wrote 1 day ago:
        Two separate problems killed it: novelty wore off for casual users, and
        content restrictions killed it for power users. Most engaging video
        content online is IP-based — memes, fan edits, remixes. Sora tried to
        build a social platform while banning the vocabulary that makes content
        worth sharing.
       
          tefkah wrote 1 day ago:
          shut up bot
       
        throwaw12 wrote 1 day ago:
        I think they have started seeing scratches in data center build up.
        
        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.
       
        nashtik wrote 1 day ago:
        For a moment, I thought it's about Sora Matshushima, the up and coming
        table tennis player
       
        maplethorpe wrote 1 day ago:
        RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of the tech
        industry in my lifetime.
       
          lnenad wrote 1 day ago:
          It's really funny how people can say these things online without
          giving them a second thought. There are literal weapons being
          produced that are killing people daily. But no, it's the meme
          generator that's evil.
       
            magguzu wrote 1 day ago:
            > one of
       
            Sohcahtoa82 wrote 1 day ago:
            This is textbook whataboutism.
            
            Yes, literal weapons are bad, too.  But that's not the current
            topic.
       
            jjulius wrote 1 day ago:
            Because this is a tech forum, not a weapons forum. I'd wager that a
            sizeable chunk of folk decrying AI/LLMs in this manner also do, in
            fact, decry the same weapons you refer to. They just do it
            elsewhere because it's not typically on-topic here.
       
              lnenad wrote 1 day ago:
              Context is tech, I agree. Is there no tech in weapons? Palantir?
              Drones? Are there developers that are proud when they made the
              kill machine 1% more precise; more optimized?
       
                jjulius wrote 1 day ago:
                Plenty of HN threads about Palantir and drones also have people
                commenting about their evil.
                
                Just because one thing is a lesser/different kind doesn't mean
                we can't also be vigilant about it as well.
       
                  lnenad wrote 1 day ago:
                  I'm not arguing that, OP said
                  
                  > RIP to one of the most evil products I've seen come out of
                  the tech industry in my lifetime.
                  
                  I'm saying Sora isn't even in the top 100 of most evil
                  products out of the tech industry.
       
                    freeplay wrote 1 day ago:
                    I think the evil part is putting it in the hands of the
                    general public. The ability to create propaganda and deep
                    fakes gives everyone a powerful tool for manipulation. The
                    rich and powerful are going to do whatever the want,
                    anyway. Everyone having access to that same tool doesn't
                    make it any less dangerous.
                    
                    There's nothing inherently evil about a knife. Standing
                    outside of a high school and handing a knife to every kid
                    walking in is pretty evil though.
       
                      lnenad wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
                      > The ability to create propaganda
                      
                      This has been possible for pretty much the entire history
                      of humanity. The bar has been lowered, but not by a lot
                      imho.
                      
                      I don't disagree on the rest, and I didn't say there
                      aren't bad uses, but there are many many good uses for
                      AI/Sora. You can't say the same for weapons.
       
                        freeplay wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
                        Genuinely curious what the [morally] good use cases for
                        Sora would be.
       
            zemo wrote 1 day ago:
            violence at scale is often facilitated by and preceded by
            propaganda at scale, which is one of Sora’s only applications.
            Certain things are obvious to normal people, like “propaganda is
            real, powerful, bad, and historical of enormous significance”.
       
          wraptile wrote 1 day ago:
          Really? A video meme generator is making your top evil products list?
       
            Capricorn2481 wrote 1 day ago:
            You're being willfully blind to how video generation platforms like
            this are already being used.
       
            3form wrote 1 day ago:
            Very little potential to be used for good and quite some potential
            to be used for bad. I think the ratio is particularly damning,
            rather than the total evil.
       
              hbn wrote 1 day ago:
              This is just a product that offers access to a model, and they
              did as much as they could to make sure it didn't output anything
              non-kosher.
              
              Video gen is going nowhere, and there's already models out there
              with less safety measures. So there's no RIP to the evil product.
       
        blindriver wrote 1 day ago:
        Sora was good but Gemini is so, so much better. And Seedance is on
        another dimension. But to be honest I'm shocked that they gave up on AI
        video. I wonder what the cause of that was?
       
        umich2025 wrote 1 day ago:
        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
       
        mancerayder wrote 1 day ago:
        Is this the thing that takes an already unusual video - an animal
        picking food from a Halloween candy on a porch caught on a porch cam -
        and turns it into a meme?  The bear instead of the raccoon.  Then turns
        into a cat playing a trumpet....then turns into massive spam where it
        turns into a grey area (a cat being surprised and chasing a dog with a
        mask) that gets reposted endlessly?
        
        A record speed into AI slop.  Is this what everything turns into when
        content creation becomes easy?    what's happening here exactly?
       
        reassess_blind wrote 1 day ago:
        Safe to assume the US government is now the only one with access?
       
        wg0 wrote 1 day ago:
        This is the indication of times ahead. Of AI services shutting down.
        
        The cost must have been a key reason for the shutdown.
        
        End is near.
       
        aldousd666 wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        npn wrote 1 day ago:
        turn out the schizos were right. most of OpenAI *real* investment money
        comes from Gulf countries. without that money flow they can't sustain
        the cash burn anymore.
       
        fraywing wrote 1 day ago:
        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).
       
          cpt_sobel wrote 1 day ago:
          What market? I thought the whole point was that Sora at the end of
          the day couldn't find a way to generate revenue
       
        ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
        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
       
          johnfn wrote 1 day ago:
          I think Sora is an excellent way to see how people's beliefs clash
          with reality. Even in this post, I see people likening Sora to
          unveiling "a weapon", it filling them with "bland dread", or
          comparing it to creating "killing robots". But now that Sora is being
          shut down, what impact did Sora actually have on society, other than
          getting a couple of people to waste their time making some funny meme
          videos? Did any of those negative externalities actually play out?
          
          If you are autistic, I feel that it causes you to see reality a more
          accurately than most here on this thread.
       
            toraway wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
            Sora was one of the earliest demos of a "wow okay that is good
            enough to be mistaken for real" GenAI model, which is what that
            comment was referencing with the "weapon" reference (the tech
            behind it not just Sora™ Videos).
            
            Sure, by the time they productized it, Sora was no longer SOTA
            thanks to the AI arms race. And ultimately positioned as a TikTok
            for Slop with an annoying watermark so didn't take the world by
            storm on its own.
            
            But since it was unveiled GenAI videos as a whole have become
            commonplace everywhere else on the internet, with plenty of
            negative impact already in terms of spam or manipulation, and we're
            barely in year 2 so far.
       
            gordonhart wrote 1 day ago:
            At least according to the Head of Product at X, Sora was by far the
            most widely used tool to create fake war videos[0] aiming to push
            various false narratives. Given how popular fake content is at Meta
            I can only imagine what they see there (if they even have anybody
            looking at this kind of thing).
            
            [0]
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://x.com/nikitabier/status/2029024577624650041
       
              johnfn wrote 14 hours 37 min ago:
              I understand that misinformation is a bad thing, and your point
              is taken that I was probably too quick to brush off the worst
              thing that Sora did as 'some funny memes'. But still. Photoshop
              is used to make a lot of misinformation, probably 1000x to
              10,000x as much as Sora did, or even more than that. Does anyone
              say the latest version of Photoshop is like unveiling a weapon?
              Does anyone say that AI driven generative fill in Photoshop is 
              like creating killing robots?
       
              heavyset_go wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
              On X, viewing actual war footage was locked behind age-gating and
              identity verification, while any idiots' fake war footage was
              uncensored and consumable by anyone.
       
          whywhywhywhy wrote 1 day ago:
          It's not that, the demo was impressive but when it became wildly
          available the reality of it never lived up to what was demoed and it
          later came out some of the shorts they did with directors had a lot
          of editing to them anyway.
       
          Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
          Sora was a bit like seeing a new weapon being demoed. No matter how
          much engineering went in to it. The overwhelming feeling was 
          “this is bad for society and the consequences will be massive.”
          
          So far that’s been exactly it. Now AI generated videos are
          primarily used to scam, deceive, and ragebait.
       
            trgn wrote 1 day ago:
            already theyve made youtube unusable
       
            tefkah wrote 1 day ago:
            exactly! while there may be some neutral to slightly positive use
            of this tech (haha funny video) I can only really see the evil uses
            of it: scams, misinformation, propaganda, easily available to
            create by anyone at massive scale.
            
            I really don't see the argument for this tech to be any kind of
            good, unless you think moving into an era where you cannot trust
            any image or video is somehow a neutral outcome, AND are happy
            about the people who are in control of this tech. which I guess
            captures a larger part of the HN crowd than I'd hoped
       
              bit-anarchist wrote 1 day ago:
              My perspective is different: we never could trust videos and
              images in the past. Our hopes, back then, were that the costs of
              faking said media (despite us being in the age of information and
              media) would remain permanently high and would deter people from
              choosing so. But this was always wishful thinking.
              
              GenAI has presented tangible proof of such risks and is forcing
              society to reevaluate the way we trust evidence. In my eyes, it
              serves as an opportunity to improve our foundations of trust to
              something that relies less on the good will of random authorities
              onto something more objective.
              
              Also, I haven't really seem anyone celebrating the large
              corporations who control AI tech. Could be simply the people I'm
              involved with, but most AI enthusiasts I've seem are more about,
              at least, open-weights AI models.
       
                toraway wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
                IMO what's really wishful thinking is believing that society
                will necessarily adapt for the better in response to a deluge
                of AI spam/ads/propaganda.
                
                You could have said the same about say, pre-AI deceptively
                edited/ragebait/made up content going viral on FB, "actually
                this is good because soon people will realize they are being
                tricked/lied to, they'll think extra-critically before sharing
                dubious content next time".
                
                Which has not happened. I can only see AI videos/images making
                the problem worse as people are fed personalized, narrowly
                targeted content that seem to perfectly appeal to their own
                beliefs/biases/emotions/etc.
                
                Also, if anything it seems like we will have to trust
                authoritative groups more thanks to GenAI. If I have to
                consider every video on the internet from e.g. Iran as fake,
                I'm going to turn to NYT or WSJ who can be relied on to
                (usually) share only original content, or highly vetted 3rd
                party content.
       
                  bit-anarchist wrote 20 hours 40 min ago:
                  I agree that the solution we may find might not necessarily
                  be for the better. In fact, there are a couple solutions I've
                  seen that fall onto that category, like banning GenAI (does
                  nothing to solve the underlying issue while control over
                  economic production always requires increased
                  authoritarianism).
                  
                  I can't really provide a truly good solution, as this problem
                  has large ramifications into philosophy and ethics, but I'd
                  think it would involve solutions like attestation and
                  certificates, and, primarily, thinking of shared media (text,
                  images, videos, etc.) not as facts, but, strictly as
                  allegations.
       
            olalonde wrote 1 day ago:
            Disagree. It's also used for high quality entertainment.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lNzYP6SjVY
       
          camillomiller wrote 1 day ago:
          "I'm autistic and tend to focus on the tech" is not a justification,
          and I would advise to stop using it as such. 
          Would you apply the same to killing robots? Hey, the Hyperthrasher
          2000 mauls people and shreds them to pieces, but it's the most
          impressive TECH demo I've ever seen!
       
            ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
            Totally disagree this is what would happen.  Hypertheasher2000
            breaks through my door to eat me. First time I’ve seen a man made
            human eating werewolf bot.
            
            Me: damn that’s cool
            …………AAAAAHHH HELP ME
       
              jjulius wrote 1 day ago:
              >Totally disagree this is what would happen.
              
              Doesn't matter if you agree that would happen, the analogy is
              valid - you're essentially admitting that you're ignoring the
              negative impacts of the tech for the sake of how impressive it
              is.
       
                ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
                Im not sure you understand the conversation we are having.
                
                I have said about 3 times I am solely judging tech by how
                impressive it is technically.
                
                I have no idea who you are arguing with.
       
                  diputsmonro wrote 1 day ago:
                  You can feel that way if you want, but to answer the
                  confusion you posed in your initial post, most people do
                  consider all aspects of a technology rather than just focus
                  on the technical achievements.    We live in a society of
                  billions of humans interacting with each other, and whether
                  or not you personally care or understand those interactions,
                  they still do exist and still impact all of our lives.    A
                  particular technology may be cool, but if it threatens the
                  lives of me or my family, I'm going to have a negative view
                  of it.
                  
                  Nothing exists in a vacuum and the way technologies affect
                  people living in the world is a fundamentally important
                  aspect of the technology itself.  To ignore them would be
                  like celebrating a cool new engine design but overlooking the
                  fact that it has a tendency to explode and kill everyone in
                  the car.  If the primary effect of a technology is human
                  suffering, then it isn't cool!
       
                    ionwake wrote 1 day ago:
                    The T-800 is cool tho
       
                      camillomiller wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
                      C’mon bro, the T-1000 is LIQUID METAL
       
          pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
          > I think the lack of nudity destroyed the adult market
          
          As we've see from Grok, building the system for producing non
          consensual nude images of other people will get the legal and PR
          hammer brought down on you fairly quickly. It's just an incredibly
          unethical thing to do.
       
          ccppurcell wrote 1 day ago:
          The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as
          who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it,
          they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is
          something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the
          point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different
          set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally
          expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to
          contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't
          excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default
          assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can
          seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.
       
          claaams wrote 1 day ago:
          The tech was fine/interesting for what it is. The product itself is
          awful and something from nightmares. It's not an enjoyable experience
          for me watching some uncanny valley slop. I'm not impressed with the
          "creativity" of someone typing in a prompt and having a plagiarismbox
          spit something out. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of someone
          actually making something is what I like. The emotion and reasons
          behind a work of art make it inspiring. The details of their
          perspective and choices they make when creating it are beautiful and
          interesting.
          
          The impact of easy AI generated video is a less certain and less
          secure world. You can't trust your eyes anymore because of how fast
          and easy it is to fake video and moments. You can't trust
          communications with someone because how easy it is to impersonate
          them over video and voice. Scams involving tools like this are
          already running rampant and it will only get worse. The sheer level
          of distrust these tools have unleashed into the world makes me wish
          they never existed. They have burned millions (billions?) of dollars
          on this when that money would have been better served going to the
          creators whose work they stole to build it. It's rotten.
       
          platevoltage wrote 1 day ago:
          The iPhone X's new feature where it approximated you facial
          expressions on a 3D character using the facial recognition sensors
          blew my mind as well.
          
          It was a party trick. I can't remember the last time I touched it.
          That's what SORA is, or was.
       
            cpt_sobel wrote 1 day ago:
            Are these the Memojis or whatever Apple calls them these days?
            Pretty much eveyry iOS update mentions them near the top of the
            list and I still have no idea where to find / create / care about
            them...
       
              sethops1 wrote 1 day ago:
              It's like when Apple announces hundreds of new emoji every
              update. Like great, those will look real nice next to the six
              emoji I ever actually use.
       
            aDivineDragones wrote 1 day ago:
            While Apple use of the tracking was not more than a party trick,
            the foundational technology they created for this is currently the
            best low budget tracking solution and heavily used in VTubing
            (online streamers that use an Avatar with live facial tracking
            instead of showing their face via webcam)
       
            asnyder wrote 1 day ago:
            I know the developer who worked on it took pride in the outcome.
            Hopefully they added some additional characters to keep it fresh.
       
              platevoltage wrote 1 day ago:
              To be fair, it was really cool. It was also a tech demo with no
              real practical application.
       
                tikotus wrote 1 day ago:
                It was really cool, unlike my phone after doing it for 5
                minutes!
                
                There were social games that used it as a feature, and it was
                fun when it worked, but it had to be disabled soon as it
                drained the battery so fast.
       
          nektro wrote 1 day ago:
          all ai video will be remembered as horrific and a showcase that its
          creators have no ethical foresight
       
            tefkah wrote 1 day ago:
            "The [AI researchers] have known sin, and this is a knowledge which
            they cannot lose."[0]
            
            which is what I would hope would happen, but they're probably fine
            not thinking about the consequences of their actions looking at
            their 7 figure salaries
            
            [0]:
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.azquotes.com/quote/834918
       
          Cider9986 wrote 1 day ago:
          Sure the tech was cool, but people already hated youtube shorts when
          they were added. I think the "HN crowd" is probably the type to
          dislike short form content, so that might be where some of the
          dislike comes from.
       
          jazzyjackson wrote 1 day ago:
          Interesting to hear your perspective. There was no shock and awe to
          me, ChatGPT changed what I thought was possible with computers, and
          everything else as far as photorealistic generation and then video
          just seemed inevitable. I decided to abstain from watching any video
          I know is AI, but of course now it’s mixed in with television and
          advertisements. I’ve started data hoarding old TV shows thinking it
          will be nice to have something to watch when the internet goes down.
       
          raw_anon_1111 wrote 1 day ago:
          I have gladly been paying $20/month for ChatGPT since the day web
          search was available and I use codex-cli every day instead of Claude
          and never have to think about limits.
          
          I also use ChatGPT as my default search engine and to help me learn
          Spanish.
          
          But image generation and video generation were a nice parlor trick. 
          But wasn’t useful for me except for images for icons for diagrams.
          
          But light you said, porn makes money and there are people who pay
          $300 a month for Grok to generate AI Porn.
       
            exodust wrote 1 day ago:
            > there are people who pay $300 a month for Grok to generate AI
            Porn.
            
            Did you just make that up?
            
            Grok barely makes "M-rated" nudity, let alone porn. Musk recently
            claimed it can do "R-Rated content", but his post got a community
            note saying otherwise.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031989543529038103
       
              4ggr0 wrote 1 day ago:
              dude, there was a huge scandal a couple of weeks ago about grok
              creating CSAM...
              
 (HTM)        [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/martinadilicosa/2026/01/09/...
       
                exodust wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
                So Musk's ex-girlfriend makes allegations about images nobody
                has seen but her, and you're locking that in as a confirmed
                scandal? Okay dude!
                
                Many users including Musk responded at the time saying he's
                seen literally zero underage images generated by Grok: [1]
                Anyone can use a range of offline tools and processes to
                generate nasty images, then blame whoever they want for that
                image. But who cares about that when there's outrage to spread
                am I right?
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2011432649353511350
       
                  4ggr0 wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
                  that's just one of the examples/sources, here's more if you
                  really care, [1] also, using Musk as a source...yeah, sure.
                  as if that's any better than sourcing his ex. if Musk says
                  he's seen none then there are none, after all he never lies
                  and always takes criticism about his companies seriously.
                  good job playing down the situation, classy act. we're not
                  talking about some difference in opinions here, it's about
                  deepfakes including children. remember, it would be an issue
                  without children being involved, that just makes it a
                  magnitude worse.
                  
 (HTM)            [1]: https://counterhate.com/research/grok-floods-x-with-...
       
                raw_anon_1111 wrote 1 day ago:
                I’m not talking about that.  Grok is really strict now about
                what you are allowed to do with uploaded pictures but there are
                well known techniques to get it to create x rated realistic
                video using pictures it generates from scratch.
       
              raw_anon_1111 wrote 1 day ago:
              You haven’t been over to r/grok_porn…
              
              Grok has gotten a lot stricter about video from uploaded images.
              But it is still able to make realistic x rated porn from AI
              generated images it creates.
              
              There are various jailbreaks that have been working for the
              longest and still work, just a brief look, half of them just
              involve “anime borders” and “transparent anime
              watermarks” over videos.
       
                exodust wrote 13 hours 31 min ago:
                > jailbreaks
                
                Your comment made it sound like "out of the box" Grok can
                generate AI porn. It can't.
                
                That reddit sub you mention is tame compared to something like
                unstable_diffusion where the AI-porn hobbyists use locally
                installed models. Some of the comments in the grok_porn sub are
                complaining about censorship, and literally complaining about
                how the anime hack isn't working. So you've only confirmed my
                point and contradicted your own.
                
                I've been messing around with sci-fi horror themes including
                graphic gore. Grok now does gore when before it wouldn't. When
                I tried nudity, it refused. This is with AI-generated images
                from scratch, nothing uploaded.
                
                Even "romantic love scene between consenting adults" was denied
                by Grok. It did 6 seconds of lightweight kissing, then refused
                to continue. The overwhelming evidence is that Grok does not
                ordinarily do "AI Porn". It doesn't advertise that it does, and
                won't produce it in normal circumstances when prompted.
       
                  raw_anon_1111 wrote 18 min ago:
                  I am not going to post links I saw to grok on r/grok_porn
                  where they within the past two weeks posted Grok generating
                  oral sex, vaginal sex and anal sex using the anime hack.   I
                  am trying to keep this somewhat appropriate up to 30 seconds
                  using the “extend video” feature.
                  
                  That’s not even counting all of the prompts that are never
                  shared to Reddit but they talk about sending it privately via
                  DM so xAI won’t patch it
       
        dcchambers wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        aarjaneiro wrote 1 day ago:
        One thing I'll give sora is that the remix feature actually required
        human input and enabled users to interact with each other through a
        novel means.
       
        152334H wrote 1 day ago:
        the invisible hand of the market strangles its strongest adherents
        
        The desire for something "new", for a Mildly Ethical product, killed
        off the most obvious path to success - to actually just make
        TikTok+AIGC, or in the present, Douyin+Seedance2.
       
        razvan_maftei wrote 1 day ago:
        I can't imagine they were getting a good return on it. And frankly,
        nothing tht came out of Sora was consequential in a positive way. The
        tech is cool, but only works if the content generation is heavily
        guardrailed and most of it ends up as content farming fodder anyway.
       
        CamelCaseName wrote 1 day ago:
        The owner of @Sora on twitter must be really regretting turning down
        the $20MM buyout offer for the handle!
       
          r0fl wrote 1 day ago:
          No way anyone is that stupid
          
          That story can’t be true
       
            efilife wrote 1 day ago:
            Can't find anything about this
       
              CamelCaseName wrote 1 day ago:
              My apologies, you are right, I was misled, it is not true.
              
              Unfortunately I can no longer edit/delete my original comment.
       
        johnfn wrote 1 day ago:
        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?
       
          mvdtnz wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
          
          I'm curious if you still feel this way about current iterations of
          ChatGPT? It seems like it's now primed to engagement bait the user,
          especially when used through the web UI. You can ask it a simple
          question with a straight forward answer and it will still try to get
          you to follow up with more.
          
          > What is the minimum thickness for Shimano M8100 disc brake rotors?
          
          > For Shimano XT M8100-series rotors (like RT-MT800 / RT-MT900
          commonly used with M8100 brakes), the minimum thickness is 1.5 mm. If
          the rotor measures 1.5 mm or thinner, Shimano says it should be
          replaced.
          
          > (a bunch of pointless details in bullet points)
          
          > If you want, tell me the exact rotor model (e.g., RT-MT800,
          RT-MT900, size), and I can confirm the spec for that specific one and
          what typical wear looks like.
          
          The entire query could have been answered with "1.5mm". The "if you
          want" follow ups are so annoying.
       
          hbn wrote 1 day ago:
          > Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to
          shutdown
          
          I think if you had to foot the bill for generating a bajillion
          gigabytes of slop with no real utility, you wouldn't be too
          mystified.
          
          They showed off their technology and proved it was impressive. That's
          all it had to do.
       
          greenie_beans wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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
          
          i recently used gpt for the first time in several months (i'm a daily
          claude user) and didn't find this at all. it is most certainly trying
          to pull you into engagement with how it ends each response. "if you
          want, i could tell you about this thing that's relevant to what you
          are discussing and tease just enough so that you addictively answer
          yes"
       
          imankulov wrote 1 day ago:
          > 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.
          
          Not about Sora, but about ChatGPT. I felt the same way for quite a
          while until I noticed that its response pattern has changed,
          apparently aiming for higher engagement. Someone aggressively pursued
          a metric.
          
          At some point, ChatGPT started leaving annoying cliffhangers in its
          every response, like "Do you want me to share a little-known secret
          of X that professionals often use?" Like, come on!
       
          cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
          "I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to shutdown"
          
          I suspect they promised synthetic movies but it quickly became clear
          that they were never going to be able to deliver on this.
          
          Slick fifteen second lulz-clips, sure, but I don't think they can
          make several of them consistent enough to fit into a larger video
          narrative without the audience finding it jarring and incoherent.
          
          Perhaps legal at Disney also concluded that the output wouldn't be
          possible to copyright, which is their core business.
       
          nananana9 wrote 1 day ago:
          What happened is that they make no money, because people use it an
          masse to generate videos that they then post on TikTok and Instagram,
          nobody actually doomscrolls Sora.
       
          AussieWog93 wrote 1 day ago:
          For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person.
          
          I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech
          leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be
          genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives.
          
          He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT
          could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even
          contribute to helping disease too.
          
          Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel.  So much of what they've
          done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and
          greed too.
          
          Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed
          back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll
          cave the same way too.
       
            presbyterian wrote 1 day ago:
            > ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide
            
            It could prevent suicide, maybe, but we know that it does cause
            suicides, at least in some cases. Seems like a poor value
            proposition.
       
            kergonath wrote 1 day ago:
            > He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT
            could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even
            contribute to helping disease too.
            
            He is a con man. Of course he’s charming and convincing, that’s
            how he ended up where he is. But he’s just as full of it as Musk
            when he was waxing lyrical about saving the world and going to
            Mars. They lie very convincingly.
       
            sfn42 wrote 1 day ago:
            I haven't followed him much as I really don't care, but the one
            clip I've seen of him that really stands out to me (I've seen more
            but this is the one I remember) is one where he's talking to some
            guy who doubts the LLMs genius, and Sam says something like "what
            if ChatGPT solved quantum gravity, would you be convinced then?"
            
            To me, this just came off as pathetic. It hasn't solved anything
            and there's no reason to believe it ever will. The whole question
            is completely pointless except to put the idea in viewers heads
            that ChatGPT will soon revolutionize science, with no actual
            substance behind it. It's not even a question, there's only one
            possible answer. He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to
            manipulate dumb viewers.
            
            So anyway that's the only memorable clip I've seen of Sam Altman,
            and based on that alone, fuck that guy.
       
              Gooblebrai wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
              > He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to manipulate dumb
              viewers.
              
              Why? The other person can say "Yes". That doesn't mean ChatGPT
              has the capability to do it?
       
                sfn42 wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
                That's the point. The other guy can only say yes - if chatgpt
                solved a hard problem and improved our understanding of the
                universe there would be no discussion as to its capability to
                do so.
                
                "No" is not a reasonable answer to the question. It's like
                asking an atheist "if god and Jesus and all the angels came to
                earth and showed themselves for all to see, would you believe
                in god then?" Well yes of course, I believe in all the things
                we can all see. The lack of evidence is the whole point.
                
                So asking "if there was evidence would you think differently?"
                Is either a fundamental misunderstanding of the persons
                position, or just a cheap ploy to manipulate people. In Sam's
                case I'm thinking it was the latter. He's a clever guy, he
                knows he's on camera. He asked that question just to plant the
                idea in people's minds - not the guy he was talking to, that
                guy didn't even need to answer the question because as already
                said there's only one answer to it. But to everyone watching,
                Sam basically just put it out there that ChatGPT solving
                quantum gravity is within the realm of possibility. Which it
                probably isn't.
       
                  Gooblebrai wrote 11 hours 32 min ago:
                  Fair, thanks for explaining
       
              piva00 wrote 1 day ago:
              The most memorable clip I've seen of him was the Brad Gerstner's
              podcast one (an investor of OpenAI), Gerstner questioned Altman
              about the financials of OAI, how could it have committed to spend
              so much given the revenue, it's a decent question and it's been
              up in the air for a while across the media.
              
              Altman's reaction was very telling of the kind of person he is,
              just immediately lashing out at Gerstner in a childish way,
              asking if Gerstner wanted to sell his shares because he could
              find a buyer in no time.
              
              It was a pathetically immature reaction, I wouldn't expect that
              from any kind of professional, even less someone who has held
              positions as Altman has and now sits at the top of the leadership
              for a company sucking hundreds of billions of investment.
              
              Apart from that clip there's also the whole saga of sama @
              Reddit, full of lies, deceptions, and the same kind of immature
              attitude peppered across Reddit itself.
       
                heavyset_go wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
                > It was a pathetically immature reaction, I wouldn't expect
                that from any kind of professional, even less someone who has
                held positions as Altman has and now sits at the top of the
                leadership for a company sucking hundreds of billions of
                investment.
                
                If you're familiar with nepobaby brats and narcissists, this is
                not surprising.
       
                mvdtnz wrote 1 day ago:
                My most memorable clip was when he was interviewed about the
                "suicide" of an ex-employee and Sama lied through his teeth. I
                can't understand people who say this snake is "charming"...
                he's a bad liar and has sub-zero charisma.
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrgEZ8FeZEc
       
                Hendrikto wrote 1 day ago:
                > Gerstner questioned Altman about the financials of OAI
                
                After glazing OpenAI and Sam personally for 45 minutes
                straight. But as soon as Sam was questioned in the slightest,
                he exploded.
       
            Lionga wrote 1 day ago:
            Thinking that Scam Altman of Worldcoin etc. fame was "genuine about
            making a product that could improve people's lives" seems like a
            strange kind of delusion.
       
            Eufrat wrote 1 day ago:
            Multiple people have attested that Sam Altman is extremely charming
            (especially in more casual, intimate settings) and talks very nobly
            about his goals, but his actual work is just…all kinds of awful.
            And I think that charm only goes so far as it seems clear that
            people are starting to demand that OpenAI actually match its words
            with work it cannot produce.
            
            I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied to the
            board, his obsession with retinal scanning everyone for his
            biometric cryptocurrency (Worldcoin), how he left Y Combinator are
            just evidence that he’s not very heroic. Most cringe to me is
            that he and many others seem aware that what their are doing is
            corrosive and harmful to society on some level as Altman has
            admitted to having a bunker somewhere around Big Sur [0].
            Which…WTF.
            
            [0]
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-...
       
              aaa_aaa wrote 1 day ago:
              He is a conman, and potentially a terrible person (look for it)
       
              morpheuskafka wrote 1 day ago:
              >  how he left Y Combinator
              
              Not too familiar with that history, but he still is listed as a
              courtesy credit/reviewer at the end of PG's blog entries, so I
              assume he didn't have too much of a bad exit?
       
                Eufrat wrote 1 day ago:
                We’ll never know exactly what exactly transpired, but I think
                the existing evidence is clear that as President of Y
                Combinator he should not have been also as involved in OpenAI
                as he was.
                
                This is a conflict of interest and I think one a very obvious
                one. He tried to have it both ways and was forced to choose in
                the end. I think putting himself in that situation rather than
                resigning up front to pursue OpenAI ambitions says a lot about
                his character.
       
            username223 wrote 1 day ago:
            Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed
            location data harvesting app ( [1] ). That's who he is, that's what
            he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the
            sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt
       
              waterproof wrote 1 day ago:
              > the things he does.
              
              The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of
              dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?
       
                rustystump wrote 1 day ago:
                A fool and his money shall soon be parted. Sam is a face. If it
                wasnt him, it would be someone else.
       
          mortsnort wrote 1 day ago:
          Hosting videos is really expensive. AI video generation inference is
          really expensive. I'd love to see how much money this experiment
          cost.
       
            karel-3d wrote 1 day ago:
            Hosting videos is not that expensive, compared to generation and
            inference costs. It's not cheap but it's not that horrible
       
            rblatz wrote 1 day ago:
            So much that they walked away from a billion dollar deal with
            Disney by dropping Sora.
       
              lossyalgo wrote 1 day ago:
              I don't think anyone outside of Disney/ClosedAI knows what deal
              was actually made. Maybe they just shut down public use of Sora
              but Disney will still be able to use it internally? Maybe they
              never even signed anything, as is too often the case with AI
              deals, especially big ones, how we read about signed/inked deals
              but then it turns out it was all just words spoken. Maybe they
              took the cash, then shut Sora down to save money? Could be any
              number of things that happened which we might never know.
       
              riffraff wrote 1 day ago:
              It's not clear to me what that billion dollar meant.
              
              To me it seems it was "Disney gets shares and we get to use their
              characters in Sora".
              
              Even if Sora breaks even, why would you gift Disney stock? It's
              not like they actual gave 1B to openai.
       
          iAMkenough wrote 1 day ago:
          > Still, I am mystified by how rapidly Sora went from launch to
          shutdown. Does anyone have any guess what happened there?
          
          My guess is they over committed server/energy resources, since they
          were generating ~30 images per frame of 1 second of video for results
          that may be discarded and then tried again.
          
          Now that energy costs are increasingly less predictable because of
          the war, they're prioritizing what is sustainable. Willing to blow up
          the $1 billion Disney deal for Sora, because that's a popular IP that
          would have increased discarded server time.
       
            iAMkenough wrote 1 day ago:
            I'm also curious if Sora has been used by Iran to generate those
            Lego propaganda videos critical of the President. Given how close
            Sam Altman is with the current administration, I wouldn't be
            surprised if Sora is now reserved for U.S. government propaganda
            only.
            
            Might be why the latest Iran propaganda video could be created in
            PowerPoint:
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/rachelbitecofer.bsky.social/post/...
       
              pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
              Are there known tells that could be used to determine which model
              the video came from?
              
              (This sort of question, and the Grok sexual abuse, is why I'd
              like to see mandatory invisible watermarks on generated
              images/video)
       
              torginus wrote 1 day ago:
              I don't think so. There are tons of self hosted models for video
              (they are smaller and easier to run).
              
              Most people serious about this stuff usually have their own
              pipelines.
       
                iAMkenough wrote 1 day ago:
                Since you seem to be better informed, I'm also interested in
                what self hosted models for video you recommend for creating my
                own Lego movie clips now that Sora is no longer an option for a
                paid service. There's tons, right?
       
                  pavlov wrote 1 day ago:
                  Look up Wan and Hunyan for starters.
                  
                  These are open weight models, so you can fine tune them on
                  Lego content… But presumably they already have enough
                  training data since they were made by Chinese companies who
                  don’t give a shit about Western IP rights.
       
                iAMkenough wrote 1 day ago:
                I'm not sure, but you could be right. Sora is/was the
                top-of-the-line platform for video generation, and the Lego IP
                videos were polished. Makes sense to outsource when your own
                energy grid is being destroyed. Anyone with an account and VPN
                could utilize the platform.
                
                I'd like to know what self hosted models they've been using, if
                any, and who provided them, trained on Lego IP.
       
        didip wrote 1 day ago:
        The thing about Sora is that it becomes outdated very quickly. OpenAI
        cannot even protect THAT moat properly.
       
        davidham wrote 1 day ago:
        I an Jack’s complete lack of sympathy.
       
        rfarley04 wrote 1 day ago:
        It's just the social app being killed off, no? Wouldn't this line up
        with rumors that they'll soon let you create videos inside of chatgpt
        itself? I wish the actual video model would die but I assume this news
        is not that.
       
          afavour wrote 1 day ago:
          According to WSJ they’re getting out of the video game entirely:
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora-v...
       
          tracerbulletx wrote 1 day ago:
          I don't think so. Disney is ending their deal with them, it sounds
          like they're exiting video generation as a business.
       
        vermilingua wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddence to bad trash. To me, this idea represents the absolute
        worst of the AI wave (out of a lot to choose from): a corporate
        controlled endless stream of the feelies to keep people plugged in and
        scrolling for nobody’s benefit except those in control of the output.
        If “entertainment” can be produced algorithmically to a volume and
        level of quality that the masses find attractive, it’s only a matter
        of time before bad (worse?) actors take control of it to start highly
        targeted campaigns of influence, far worse than what we’ve already
        seen.
       
          EugeneOZ wrote 1 day ago:
          This market will not be abandoned, and other tools already exist: [1]
          [2]
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://klingai.com/global/
 (HTM)    [2]: https://aistudio.google.com/models/veo-3
 (HTM)    [3]: https://runwayml.com
       
          bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
          relax dude
       
          raincole wrote 1 day ago:
          They are not getting rid of Sora because people won't want AI videos
          lol. They're getting rid of Sora because they're so behind in this
          realm. AI videos online are mostly made with Chinese models, and the
          situation has been like this for more than one year.
          
          The percentage of AI videos over the internet will certainly not
          decrease after Sora is gone.
          
          The question is when will Chinese coding models have their Seedance
          moment and squeeze Opus/Codex out of market. It weirdly feels
          impossible and inevitable at the same time.
       
            SXX wrote 1 day ago:
            Its no surprise Chinese models will eventually win in a video
            generation race since they are far less censored and not affected
            by crazy copyright system.
            
            It much easier to make Qwen animate tankman than it's to make any
            western model to generate indigenous people dancing because cough
            cough naked skin is baaaaad. Except this Musk one that will
            nonetheless affected by all the copyright mess.
       
          farzd wrote 1 day ago:
          Already being used in that manner, here a small glimpse - every video
          on this page is AI and an advert:
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://www.tiktok.com/@livbennettstudies
       
          torginus wrote 1 day ago:
          I'm kinda surprised about how hard GenAI fell on its face in the arts
          (including SD and other video generators). It seemed so promising,
          when SD came out and it turned out the model fit on people's GPUs.
          People started making LoRAs, hyperparameter tunes, mixing models,
          training models for representing characters, ComfyUI and Controlnet
          came out yada yada.
          
          Then it became synonymous with slop, lowest common denominator
          content made without care, instead of a tool for enabling people
          willing to put in a varying level of skill, kinds of expertise and
          effort, like coding models did.
       
            diputsmonro wrote 1 day ago:
            I feel like it was inevitable that it would become slop.  The
            models are impressive, but they can really only get you 80% there.
            
            If you want a video of a dancing cat, sure, you can get that. But
            if you want an orange tabby doing the moonwalk or the robot, that's
            a lot harder.  You'll have to generate dozens of videos and fine
            tune prompt incantations before you get what you want, if you even
            do before you hit a rate limit or you get frustrated. If you want
            something specific and unique and interesting, you still need to
            put in a lot of effort. Therefore, most videos that people actually
            make and share are pretty generic.
            
            I think most art models have subtle tells and limitations similar
            to textual LLMs too, just a little harder to recognize. Certain
            ideas and imagery will be easier to generate and more likely to
            fill in the gaps of your prompt.  The technology is fascinating
            compared to the nothing that we had before, but it still has real
            limitations - try to get it to generate an Italian plumber wearing
            a red hat that isn't Mario, for example.
            
            All that to say, the trend towards low effort, repetitive, and 
            uncreative results is inherent in the medium.  Most users will
            prompt for a generic dancing cat and get something resembling a cat
            doing something that resembles a dance and that will flood social
            media.    The few people going for a more creative and specific
            artistic view will be frustrated by the constant rolling of dice,
            and if they do make something they work hard on, it will be drowned
            out by the low effort slop posts.  And if you're frustrated by
            those limitations and want to make something intentional, then
            you'll eventually gravitate towards Photoshop or Blender where you
            can actually craft the exact thing you want.
            
            These models do not really "democratize art", they just make it
            really easy to generate visually interesting noise.  Once the
            novelty wears off, the limitations are apparent.  Art has always
            been democratized anyway - Blender and Krita are free, and pencils
            are cheap.
       
            fc417fc802 wrote 1 day ago:
            You're conflating mainstream popular opinion and professional
            usage. They're entirely separate. The obvious low effort pieces get
            lambasted. Meanwhile the high effort work doesn't draw attention.
            The public perception right now has little to do with technical
            capabilities being driven almost entirely by social factors.
       
            MattGaiser wrote 1 day ago:
            What the masses have found entertaining has always been referred to
            as slop, so I am not sure it matters.
            
            Novels, cinema, television, comic books, etc.
            
            They were all considered careless skill-free slop at some point.
       
            iterateoften wrote 1 day ago:
            You’re most likely consuming a large quantity of genai art
            without even knowing it.
       
              Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
              I never understood what people are trying to say with comments
              like that.
              
              - You're making unsubstantiated claim
              
              - personally targeting someone you don't even know
              
              - in order to celebrate presumed success of a mass fraud?
       
              toraway wrote 1 day ago:
              Sure, and I'm also consuming a gigantic quantity of GenAI art
              while knowing it, completely against my will. Which like OP has
              soured my overall perception of it.
              
              The existence of inoffensive use cases doesn't invalidate
              anything OP is saying, that's just a natural human reaction to
              overexposure of a technology.
              
              In the span of less than 2 years, pretty much everywhere I look
              has been inundated with zero-effort spam, manipulated imagery,
              etc that has had a net-negative impact on my life. Even if it may
              also be helpful for a small business making a flyer or whatever
              without actively making my life worse, that doesn't really move
              the needle on my overall attitude.
       
                Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
                > manipulated imagery
                
                And we thought iPhone camera videos were bad... (they were (and
                are) though)
       
              jazzyjackson wrote 1 day ago:
              Sure, and there’s lot of great man made art that I don’t
              enjoy quite as much because I can’t get the question out of my
              head, is this even a photograph someone took, is this even a
              painting someone bothered to paint. I get the sense that there
              are a lot of folks that just want the end result judged on its
              own merits, like, is it a funny vine or not, is it a compelling
              beautiful digital painting or not, but I want to know whether
              there’s a person behind it, expressing themselves, growing as
              an artist etc, or if the picture on my phone is totally divorced
              from any humans actual desire to say something. Having them mixed
              in the same pot just makes me less hungry.
       
                jallmann wrote 1 day ago:
                This is where curation matters, eg in a newsroom or gallery.
                Provenance is their job, and if done well, can connect people
                in a way that an unfiltered social media firehose can't.
       
                  jazzyjackson wrote 1 day ago:
                  Yea fair enough, I’m hoping I can encourage the folks in my
                  life that are not adept at telling truth from fiction to just
                  cut out looking at any social media firehouse.
                  
                  It’s so dumb that Zuck and Elmo want to
                  inject^H^H^H^H^H^Hrecommend content into these people’s
                  feeds while they’re checking in on their neices and nephews
                  and local book clubs.
       
          nomel wrote 1 day ago:
          I'm having trouble understanding this. There were some very funny
          videos, created by people with a great sense of humor, and I happen
          to enjoy laughing, and I don't feel bad about that. I always saw it
          as the Vine of AI.
          
          For a litmus test of your perspective, try using sora. Try to make a
          video that makes someone genuinely laugh. Sora doesn't prompt itself.
          Human creativity and humor is still required.
          
          Sure, it was moderated to heck, like all models attempting to avoid
          PR disasters (see Grok), but, just as with Youtube and broadcast TV,
          there's still a corporate friendly  surface area that excludes porn,
          gore, etc, that people can enjoy. And yes, people like different
          things.
       
            jorl17 wrote 1 day ago:
            There's such a fascinating divide on this.
            
            I am 100% with you. I didn't ever _use_ Sora, but some of it
            trickled down to me (mostly through Instagram reels). I think it's
            amazing that we have such great new tools to express ourselves, and
            that we are trying out new platforms, paradigms, and approaches.
            
            Is there money involved? Absolutely, but I don't fault companies
            for trying to earn their keep.
            
            It 100% takes work to use these tools in the right way to make
            something funny. Ask an LLM to make them on their own and they'll
            hardly evoke laughs (I'm sure that'll change too, though).
       
            RajT88 wrote 1 day ago:
            > created by people with a great sense of humor
            
            The real problem with AI slop is not the AI.  It's the people. 
            It's always the people.
            
            The clickbait has started fooling people more than before, with the
            latest videos being halfway believable (except for the
            circumstances of the videos).
            
            Technology enables the most malicious and self-interested, and
            systems need to be adjusted to not reward that, or users need to
            become wise to it.
            
            With the amount of early 2000's style clickbait ads still around,
            I'm not sure we ever vanquished Web 1.0 style clickbait, it just
            got crowded out by ever more sophisticated forms.
       
            qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
            There were some genuinely very, very funny videos made on there. A
            lot of slop, but some definite nuggets of gold.
       
            b00ty4breakfast wrote 1 day ago:
            that's just empty consumption, there's nothing that makes art great
            in algorithmically generated content except at the shallowest of
            levels.  I mean no disrespect, but that is extremely sad and all
            too indicative of the instrumental reasoning of the industrial
            milieu.  It's about 2 steps above marrying a sex doll.
       
            vermilingua wrote 1 day ago:
            Yes, I don’t doubt that there was some very high quality
            human-moderated output. The point is that you likely can’t
            accurately distinguish the human-moderated output from the entirely
            generated slop (especially as it’s being trained and refined on
            the rest of the content), and so what chance does the average
            non-technical person have?
            
            Then, when they start ratcheting the slop ratio up (likely under
            the justification of keeping up with declining creator engagement),
            the consumers get more and more adjusted to a pure-slop feed, until
            bingo you have a direct line into the midbrain of millions of
            consumers/voters/parents/employees/serfs.
       
            rogerrogerr wrote 1 day ago:
            I feel like taking in GenAI content, even if it makes me laugh,
            probably does something bad to my brain. It looks like real life,
            but the physics is just wrong in ways that range from obvious to
            very subtle. I don’t want to feed my brain videos of things that
            look photorealistic but do not depict reality, that just seems
            foolish somehow.
            
            Like, imagine if you watched a bunch of GenAI videos of cars
            sliding on ice from the driver’s perspective. The physics is
            wrong, and surely it’s going to make you a worse driver because
            you are feeding your internal prediction engine incorrect training
            data. It’s less likely that you’ll make the right prediction in
            real life when it counts.
       
              lotsofpulp wrote 1 day ago:
              Do you feel the same about special effects in professionally
              produced media?
       
                vincnetas wrote 1 day ago:
                special effects make most people think that they could jump
                farther or from higher ground that they actually can. and most
                people think that all cars explode in massive fireballs.
       
                diego_sandoval wrote 1 day ago:
                I'm not OP, but I do get annoyed by bad car physics on movies.
                
                The worst offenders are brake sounds not correlating to the car
                movement, engine sounds not correlating to the car's
                acceleration, nonsensical car deceleration while braking, and
                steering wheel not correlating to car steering.
       
                ori_b wrote 1 day ago:
                Yes, I think consuming too much media, and creating too little
                is bad for the brain.
       
                michaelchisari wrote 1 day ago:
                Not op but if I’m being honest, I don’t feel as if that’s
                the case until I see a film whose special effects are limited
                to mise en scene and matte paintings and then I always have
                this overwhelming feeling that we’re all missing out.
                
                Films on film using in camera effects are still made on
                occasion but they’re art films for niche audiences.
                
                But we’ll never get another Ben Hur. And that doesn’t sit
                well with me even if society can’t yet fully explain why.
       
                Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
                Effort makes a great deal of difference for me. The effort
                itself, the fact that it's there.
                
                I am willing to suspend disbelief for Terminator 1, even if it
                is clear, that it's a head of the doll in shot.
                
                But it is insulting to feed slop to your audience; it shows you
                didn't even try.
                
                I have actually seen one slop-video, that I kinda enjoyed - it
                was obvious, that a great effort was put in a script and
                details as much as it was obvious it isn't being passed for the
                real thing.
       
                dieselgate wrote 1 day ago:
                Are there energy consumption differences between CGI and AI?
       
                  Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
                  We also need to take into account, that CGI only consumes
                  energy when the actual creation of particular video happens.
                  
                  "AI" consumes energy before user even started (during
                  training).
                  
                  That is on top of comparison for each particular case.
       
                    sdenton4 wrote 1 day ago:
                    Right idea, but the application is incorrect.
                    
                    Model training is similar to the creation of the cgi for
                    the movie. Both happen before anyone consumes the output,
                    and represent the up front cost for the producer.
                    
                    Both a movie and a language model can cost tens or hundreds
                    of dollars to produce.
                    
                    In both cases additional infrastructure is needed for
                    efficient usage: movie theaters or streaming platforms for
                    movies, and data centers with the GPUs for LLMs. This is
                    also upfront (capex) costs.
                    
                    At consumption time, the movie requires some additional
                    resources, per viewing, whether it's a movie theater or
                    streaming. Likewise, an llm consumes some resources at
                    inference time. These are opex. In both cases, the marginal
                    cost for inference/consumption is quite low.
       
                      Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
                      > Model training is similar to the creation of the cgi
                      for the movie. Both happen before anyone consumes the
                      output
                      
                      I did not say anything about consumption of the output.
                      Maybe you misread what I wrote, it is about energy
                      consumption.
                      
                        > Both a movie and a language model can cost
                      
                      But we weren't comparing cost of the movie to cost of a
                      language model
                      
                        > can cost tens or hundreds of dollars
                      
                      But we weren't talking about dollars, we were talking
                      about energy.
                      
                      We're clearly exploring different questions.
       
                        sdenton4 wrote 1 day ago:
                        And that energy costs money, both at the training/cgi
                        stage and at the inference/consumption stage. It's not
                        even an externality.
                        
                        CGI renders do use a lot of electricity relative to
                        playing back the movie for individual viewers. It's
                        perfectly analogous.
       
                          Insimwytim wrote 1 day ago:
                          > CGI renders do use a lot of electricity relative to
                          playing back the movie for individual viewers. It's
                          perfectly analogous.
                          
                          I've literally laughed at loud after reading this.
                          
                          I can't believe you're stretching this in a good
                          faith.
                          
                          But if you are - well, you're certainly have a unique
                          perspective.
       
                chamomeal wrote 1 day ago:
                I feel like people do sometimes have a warped sense of reality
                from consuming too much media, ie porn
       
                randerson wrote 1 day ago:
                When I watch a film, I know it is fiction and special effects.
                But most of the fake AI-generated videos are being passed off
                as real on social media. It is exhausting (and increasingly
                difficult) to analyze every video on my feed to try figure out
                if its real.
       
                rogerrogerr wrote 1 day ago:
                I was thinking about this while typing. I don’t really care
                about classically animated content; it’s generally not trying
                to be indistinguishable from real life and I don’t feel like
                my brain trains on it.
                
                But I think I do have similar feelings about special effects. A
                difference is that special effects tend to depict scenarios
                very outside of the envelope of normal experience, so probably
                not very damaging if my model of “what does a plane crash
                look like” is screwed up.
                
                Though some effects probably are damaging - how many people
                subconsciously assume cars explode when they are in an
                accident? A poor mental model of the odds of a car exploding
                could cause you to make poor real-life decisions (like moving
                someone out of a wrecked car in a panic instead of waiting for
                EMS, risking spine/neck injury)
       
                  heavyset_go wrote 1 day ago:
                  Media has warped people's mental models of what car wrecks
                  are like at different speeds, being stabbed, being shot,
                  drowning, seizures, falls from different heights, falls into
                  water, giving CPR, when it is/isn't appropriate to give CPR,
                  appropriate responses to natural disasters, etc.
       
                  fc417fc802 wrote 1 day ago:
                  To your point about cars - such an expectation could well
                  save your life now that there are so many EVs on the road.
                  You do not want to hang out in one of those after a
                  collision. Regardless, I agree that it's probably a bad idea
                  to instill defective mental models in people.
       
                    rogerrogerr wrote 1 day ago:
                    Eh, the stats don’t seem to support EVs being terribly
                    explosion-prone either. In comparison to gas cars, maybe,
                    but both are very safe in absolute terms. Harder to
                    extinguish if they do catch fire, but I think if I came
                    upon a fresh accident and there’s no immediate signs of a
                    battery fire (airbags smoke, it’s normal), I would still
                    leave the victim in the car seated until someone trained
                    shows up.
                    
                    Sure, be ready to get them out, and if they’re trapped
                    and it’s going to be a while until fire shows up start
                    working on that. But my mental model is that for any road
                    legal car that is not currently on fire, there is a higher
                    chance you’ll cause harm by rashly moving a victim than
                    that a victim will be suddenly consumed by an enormous
                    Hollywood style conflagration.
       
                      fc417fc802 wrote 1 day ago:
                      The likelihood or lack thereof is not the problem. My
                      mental model might be off because it largely isn't based
                      on EVs but I've seen plenty of videos of e-bikes and more
                      generally cheap lithium batteries going up in flames and
                      I don't think it's at all comparable to a pool or stream
                      of gasoline catching on fire. The issue is how rapidly it
                      develops since it doesn't require an external oxidizer
                      which is exactly the same as a firework.
       
                  lacunary wrote 1 day ago:
                  if it worked this way, we could get good at golf by watching
                  TV, writing songs by listening to the radio, or doing math by
                  watching 3b1b. but it doesn't - we don't learn that way, for
                  better or worse.
       
                    hansvm wrote 1 day ago:
                    That's not a great comparison. People absolutely do learn
                    by watching, especially when they do so actively.
                    
                    Your counter-examples have the property that most of the
                    things you need to learn are absent from the media being
                    watched, leading to an observation which is "obviously"
                    true, but they ignore the impact of media on a journey
                    properly incorporating other pieces of information. To
                    compare to the mental models being discussed, you'd have to
                    actually consider effects you're writing off as negligible,
                    and when it comes to something like a world model which
                    we've only learned by observation and which doesn't have a
                    lot of additional specialized knowledge those effects might
                    be much more impactful.
       
                    diego_sandoval wrote 1 day ago:
                    But you do get good at driving by playing realistic driving
                    games.
       
                    lotsofpulp wrote 1 day ago:
                    I agree with rogerrogerr, and your comparisons don’t make
                    sense to me.  Getting good at complex motions and
                    understanding theory is far different than building a
                    simple model of cause and effect in the real world.
                    
                    Most people can’t explain the physics they see, but they
                    can deduce enough to be able to predict the effects of
                    physical actions most of the time.
       
        cyberge99 wrote 1 day ago:
        Disney might be worried about Musk installing Byron as governor of
        Florida.  Disney is probably still reeling from the Ron Desantis
        political attacks.
       
        agnishom wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddance?
        
        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.
       
        max_ wrote 1 day ago:
        Relevant Music -
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzLhXesNkCI
       
        rossjudson wrote 1 day ago:
        "Sora, generate a video of Mickey Mouse beating up Sam Altman."
       
        oliyoung wrote 1 day ago:
        So what died first? The Disney deal or the Sora app
       
        dev1ycan wrote 1 day ago:
        Bahaha.
       
        bananamogul wrote 1 day ago:
        So are they killing Sora entirely, or just the Sora mobile app?
        
        There's a web interface as well.
       
        bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
        we hardly knew ye
       
        bschwindHN wrote 1 day ago:
        Good riddance. AI video generation is not something humanity needs.
       
          neonyarn wrote 20 hours 51 min ago:
          We'll let the market decide that rather than your emotional outbursts
       
          iugtmkbdfil834 wrote 1 day ago:
          I don't really disagree, but the proper way to think about it was
          that with Sora some of that ability democratized. Now it will be
          available only to the rich and powerful ( and nerdy ). Humanity may
          not need it per se, but removal of that option that does not
          automatically make it better; not if the removal is only for a
          portion of the population.
       
            otikik wrote 1 day ago:
            > democratized
            
            I really don't think that using that term is appropriate when
            there's a multi-billion American macro corporation involved in the
            activity in question.
       
              mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
              HN loves to abuse the term to pretend it's somehow a good thing
              when one human being is in control of something.
       
            Peritract wrote 1 day ago:
            > with Sora some of that ability democratized
            
            No it didn't; OpenAI had control.
            
            Saying Sora democratised video generation is like saying that
            landlords democratised home ownership.
       
            bschwindHN wrote 1 day ago:
            Nah, that's not the "proper" way to think about it, that's just
            your opinion.
            
            As it stands today, AI video generation tools like Sora suck up
            useful energy and produce things that are useless at best
            (throwaway short form videos), and harmful at worst (propaganda,
            deepfakes).
            
            Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway,
            "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.
       
              serf wrote 1 day ago:
              >Rich people were always going to do what they wanted anyway,
              "democratizing" that doesn't make the situation better.
              
              total disagree.
              
              if you put vid gen in the hands of regular people then regular
              people get super-powered in that they begin to recognize the
              frame pacing, frame counts, and typical lengths and features of
              an AI video.
              
              Do you know how many people have cited AI videos in this war?
              We'd all be better off if all of us were betting at spotting
              fakes rather than allowing the fakes to illicit hardcore
              emotional responses from every peon on the street.
       
                diputsmonro wrote 1 day ago:
                Even if that were true, the little quirks of private large
                scale video models would be different than the public cheap
                ones.  If anything, it would just give the public a false sense
                of being able to detect AI videos and overlook the more subtle
                flaws of privately made ones.
       
                bschwindHN wrote 1 day ago:
                I think you're overestimating the average person. We can give
                people direct, scientifically-backed evidence of something, and
                there will still be significant groups of people fervently
                denying it.
                
                The resources (money, energy, opportunity cost of engineering
                time) put into AI video generation are better spent elsewhere.
                Not pouring resources into it would hopefully stunt its
                progress, making AI generated propaganda lower quality and
                easier to spot.
       
              iugtmkbdfil834 wrote 1 day ago:
              So only rich people can propagandize? How is that better?
       
                EugeneOZ wrote 1 day ago:
                There are open-source alternatives: [1] [2] and others. There
                are free to use tools also.
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://mochi1ai.com/
 (HTM)          [2]: https://wan.video/
       
                bschwindHN wrote 1 day ago:
                There are a lot of things it seems only rich people can do and
                get away with. It doesn't mean I support it or want them to do
                it, but that seems to be the reality.
                
                If I may make an analogy, it would be like looking at rich
                corporations dumping toxic chemicals into our waterways, and
                saying "wow I wish I could dump toxic chemicals in the water
                too, not fair!"
                
                The point is that if a rich person wants to do it, my only hope
                is that they have to spend a significant amount of their
                resources to do it, and that there would be immense negative
                social pressure against them when they do.
       
                bigyabai wrote 1 day ago:
                OpenAI never gave the community the weights. They always
                intended to monopolize it for corporate extortion, they didn't
                "democratize" shit.
       
            Forgeties79 wrote 1 day ago:
            Video production is already wildly democratized. AI did not lower
            the barrier to entry. Digital tools already did most of the
            legwork.
       
        olalonde wrote 1 day ago:
        "Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to
        building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start
        assisting this project. "
        
        Is it happening? :) /s
       
        cdrnsf wrote 1 day ago:
        If they manage to compete with Anthropic in the enterprise market, are
        either of them able to reach profitability? To what degree are they
        subsidizing token usage and how tolerant are enterprise customers of
        significant price increases?
       
        yoyohello13 wrote 1 day ago:
        It’s been interesting seeing OpenAI pivot. Snapping up popular open
        source devs, sicking their bought and paid for politicians on their
        competitors.
        
        They probably see how much Anthropic is absolutely crushing them in
        developer mind share (see, people who  buy tokens) and want a piece.
       
        ctdinjeu5 wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        yalogin wrote 1 day ago:
        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
       
          dangus wrote 1 day ago:
          Something about your phrasing is such hilarious techbrained spin.
          
          Let’s be real: OpenAI is circling the drain.
          
          The company with the fraudster serial liar CEO who said he was gonna
          spend a trillion dollars can’t keep a video service alive right
          after signing a $1 billion dollar with Disney?
          
          What kind of a joke is that?
          
          This is a company that has blown its opportunity twiddling around
          with zero product. They still just run a plain chatbot interface with
          zero moat and zero stickiness.
          
          There’s no “pivot” for a company that is in this deep.
       
            k3k3 wrote 1 day ago:
            Why was Sam brought back? Swear it's all gone downhill for them
            since that debacle re. firing him.
       
              pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
              Because he's a charismatic liar. Extremely effective and useful
              for a company that is burning money to secure more investments.
       
              carefree-bob wrote 1 day ago:
              Sam was brought back because there was no one to replace him. The
              non-profit types on the board were living in a consensus bubble
              that didn't extend far beyond a small inner circle, and they
              discovered that they didn't have sufficient support from the
              engineers who had lots of other employment options and threatened
              to quit if Altman wasn't reinstated. Altman himself had no
              problem finding a replacement job in a matter of hours, and the
              board was looking at a business drained of talent in a cut-throat
              tech race.
              
              I'm no fan of Altman or OpenAI, it's a pretty shady company and I
              am suspicious of their books, but this was a great demonstration
              of the uselessness of boards and how out of touch they are with
              the business they are supposed to be supervising. It's really
              rare to find an effective board, primarily they sit like a House
              of Lords enjoying ceremonial perks and a stipend in exchange for
              holding a few meetings a year.
       
          Frieren wrote 1 day ago:
          > OpenAI correctly realized overindexong on consumer where there
          isn’t money is not the right way.
          
          It says a lot about the current economy that consumers have no money.
          Will companies just stop making consumer products?
       
            yalogin wrote 1 day ago:
            Consumers have always paid with data not money. That is just how we
            are groomed. In fact that is more valuable to companies as it turns
            out. Sora though doesn’t work that way, it costs the company a
            lot with no useful data for them. It was always a vehicle to raise
            the company’s image and nothing else. The only way it’s useful
            for them is to show the user count to investors in their next
            funding round. Served no other purpose, but the market changed
            around them.
       
              Frieren wrote 1 day ago:
              > is more valuable to companies as it turns out
              
              Yes. I have noticed that is close to impossible to get good deals
              on flights, hotels, or even good discounts on-line. Sellers have
              all the information from consumers that they need to maximize
              their profit and extract the maximum amount from consumers.
              Dynamic pricing is making it a personalized experience, so I
              personally pay the maximum I possible can.
              
              No room to get a fair price anymore.
       
              solid_fuel wrote 1 day ago:
              "always" is doing a lot of work here.  Just 20 years ago I think
              consumers largely paid with money, not personal data.
       
            techgnosis wrote 1 day ago:
            Consumers never pay for stuff on the internet. FB, Insta, TikTok,
            Google products, Reddit, Snapchat. This is not a new realization
            that OpenAI is having.
       
        bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
        And this kills the Disney deal:
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-shut...
       
        halyconWays wrote 1 day ago:
        They need the GPU cycles to help target children to bomb for their new
        partnership with the US military.
       
        jmugan wrote 1 day ago:
        That jumping Sora logo always made the videos unwatchable for me. So
        distracting from the scene of Elvis fighting aliens or whatever I was
        watching.
       
        KnuthIsGod wrote 1 day ago:
        The press release reads alike OpenAI slop.
       
        elzbardico wrote 1 day ago:
        Let's be frank, this was probably too fucking expensive to run
       
        meken wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
          y-curious wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
          You know who the novelty didn’t wear off for? My in-laws, who for
          some ungodly reason are superusers on TikTok. Once the audio-enabled,
          realistic videos of babies and children hit the feed, it was a
          virtual 9/11 moment. The group chat is spammed by 90% believable
          videos of babies arguing, dogs doing smart shit and it’s all slop.
          
          I am hoping against hope that this will stem the tide because the
          slop-generators are too lazy or too poor to run other models locally
          or search them online.
       
          disqard wrote 1 day ago:
          "...and when everyone's super, no one will be"
          
          I think this is starting to play out.
          
          When I personally see a blog post which didn't need an image, but
          still does have an AI-slop image banner, I mentally check out. I
          might have Claude summarize it, or (more likely) just skip it
          altogether.
       
          Nifty3929 wrote 1 day ago:
          It's not really that people wouldn't come back - it's that they were
          losing money on each customer.
          
          Those 100 videos probably cost $100+ for them to create. Did you pay
          them $100+? (not a critisism, just a re-framing)
       
            staticcaucasian wrote 1 day ago:
            When it launched we all talked about the serving/inference costs
            being massive. In hindsight if they had a paywall, it might not
            have self-imploded so fast, might have stayed aspirational, and
            they might have a profitable business today. Interesting case
            study.
       
          m3kw9 wrote 1 day ago:
          Humans are very good at pattern recognition, even if you generate
          different stuff, you still see a pattern, either in the cutting,
          color, cadence of movements, the color grading, camera lens used,
          everything, your mind will tag it as slop.
          
          Essentially you are watching the same videos over and over
          subconsciously
       
            pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
            This is something that people working on procedurally generated
            games have already noticed. No Man's Sky has billions of planets,
            each with "unique" plant and animal species, but you can easily
            sort them into a few dozen templates with minor variations.
            
            Procgen has a niche, but it never became ubiquitous, because for
            most people exploring a nice hand-made intentional environment is
            better.
       
            rustystump wrote 1 day ago:
            U say that but then when u look at most “content” on social
            media it is the same video over and over again. How many JRE
            podcasts are basically the same crap as last time? How many
            influencer “life” videos are the same thing over again? Even
            the stuff i like is formulaic to the point ai can almost write the
            scripts.
            
            I think people attach to other people more than “ai”. When
            there isnt a narrative “person” behind the content it is way
            less interesting.
       
            meken wrote 1 day ago:
            Wow that's a really good point. The style of the videos did become
            quite repetitive.
       
          JeremyNT wrote 1 day ago:
          Yep. Impressive toys, but not useful day to day.
          
          There's some market for b2b I'm sure, but as a consumer facing
          product it's tough to see how it could ever come close to paying for
          itself.
       
          Dumblydorr wrote 1 day ago:
          Reminds me of when photo filters and initial stickers and mirror
          filters came out on MacBook in like 2007. It was super fun for a
          couple days then the novelty wore off.
       
          josefresco wrote 1 day ago:
          This tracks my usage exactly. It was like Mad Libs - in that moment
          it was THE MOST FUN but after a while it became just a novelty
          bordering on... creepy. Now I feel kind of guilty for having exposed
          so many friends to what looks like a data gathering scheme.
       
          Cthulhu_ wrote 1 day ago:
          It's the same with e.g. faceapp, fun for a minute but then... then
          what?
          
          And this is the challenge that these tools have - they have to have a
          free tier to get people to explore it, but unless they can make it a
          habit, those people will never upgrade to a paid subscription.
          
          I have no figures, but if I'm being optimistic, these freemium
          subscription services have 10% conversion rate at best; can that 10%
          pay for the other 90%? For a lot of services that's a yes, but not
          for these video generators which are incredibly compute intensive.
          
          I'm sure there's a market for it, but it's not this freemium consumer
          oriented model, not without huge amounts of investments. Maybe in
          5-10 years, assuming either compute becomes 10-100x cheaper / more
          available, or they come up with generators that run cheaper.
       
          bit1993 wrote 1 day ago:
          I thinks its the same reason why chess tournaments, where two AIs
          play against each other are not as popular, compared to when two
          humans play each other. Maybe its because humans generally compare
          themselves to other humans and that's part of how they value.
       
          yoz-y wrote 1 day ago:
          The problem is that due to the ease these can be made there is also
          really no reason to make this social. “Why would I look at somebody
          else’s creations when I can do mine.”
       
            teekert wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
            Didn't we used to think the same of Photos?
       
            WarmWash wrote 1 day ago:
            I'm not an artist or creative person in any sense. My persona is
            closer to a settings menu than a colorful canvas.
            
            The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything I
            have been able to come up with. We're not at the point yet where
            you can just prompt "Make me a video that is visually stunning and
            captivating" and get something cool.
       
              pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
              > The AI art I have seen creatives produce is far beyond anything
              I have been able to come up with
              
              .. such as? What's the "Mona Lisa of AI art"? Is there, like, a
              gallery? Awards?
       
                WarmWash wrote 1 day ago:
                Unfortunately I don't have a solid reference point or checklist
                for the defining qualities of "good art". And frankly I don't
                take those who do very seriously. To me art is all about the
                personal vibes you get from it. So I enjoy Zach London (gossip
                goblin), Bennet Weisbren, and voidstomper/gloomstomper if you
                want something to measure with your "real true art" checklist.
       
              dylan604 wrote 1 day ago:
              > My persona is closer to a settings menu than a colorful canvas
              
              ah, but what a persona that would be if you were a Kai's Power
              Tools settings menu!
       
            Cthulhu_ wrote 1 day ago:
            I can see some usage for this use case - "look Morty, I turned
            myself into a pickle!" - but just like image / meme generators,
            this is like 10-30 seconds of engagement within a friend circle at
            best (although some might go viral, but that won't bring in much
            money for in this case OpenAI).
            
            There will be (or is, I'm behind the times / not on the main social
            networks) an undercurrent or long tail of AI generated videos, the
            question is whether those get enough engagement for the creators to
            pay for the creation tool.
       
            muzani wrote 1 day ago:
            They're different impulses. Some want to consume. Others want to
            create.
            
            TikTok and social media is a strange mix of both, people posting
            response videos to everything.
            
            Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc
            because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream
            music or whatever lofi playlist. It's free, it's good enough, and
            it's not grating to hear after a few days of that favorite song.
            
            The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make educational
            content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an uppercut.
            
            But I guess the desire to create something that others would
            consume is also different from the desire to simply create.
       
              wartywhoa23 wrote 1 day ago:
              I'm with you here, resonates so much. I'm so fed up with endless
              subway tunnels, they all look and sound utterly same and boring.
              
              So I quit riding the overpriced subway altogether and now consume
              AI-generated subway imagery and soundscapes for free, they are
              just good enough to feed my passion for boring tunels.
              
              Some ego-bloated edgelords had nerve to tell me that there are,
              like, other modes of transportation, but I honestly find their
              high-horse elitism despicable.. Damn morons.
       
              code_for_monkey wrote 1 day ago:
              you could not waterboard an admission of bad taste like this out
              of me
       
              mlrtime wrote 1 day ago:
              How do you get Suno songs for free? You listen to others or make
              your own?
       
                muzani wrote 1 day ago:
                They have a discover section for songs made public.
       
                animuchan wrote 1 day ago:
                Almost nobody listens to others' songs on Suno, that's the
                entire point.
                
                You wouldn't care to order the food as I personally like it --
                might be too spicy (or too bland) for your taste.
                
                Suno songs are overtuned for personal preference in the same
                way.
       
                  mlrtime wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
                  I get that, but you have to pay to create your own.
                  
                  And on the second part, I somewhat disagree. I mean, yes
                  everyone has a personal preference, but if you bucket all
                  those personal preferences they all fit nicely together (In
                  many buckets).
       
                    animuchan wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
                    A fairly narrow buckets, sure.
                    
                    I think the point of Suno is to make you not search for
                    your specific thing though, and instead produce your own.
                    Searching for niche music has always been a thing. If our
                    goal is to listen for free, we don't care about Suno (or
                    any other way to make music) one bit, it's just another DAW
                    for those making music.
                    
                    And AI music in general sure has its fans, check out Only
                    Fire for example.
       
              hansmayer wrote 1 day ago:
              Sweet Jesus. You realise this is the mental equivalent of
              stuffing your stomach full of junkfood and soda every day?
       
                weirdmantis69 wrote 1 day ago:
                As opposed to the kardashians and real house wives and Chappell
                Roan?
       
                  hansmayer wrote 1 day ago:
                  No, the whole horseshit belongs together of course. Just that
                  the AI slop is the logical culmination of the dumbed down
                  pop-culture of the last 15ish years or so.
       
                muzani wrote 1 day ago:
                This is a mainstream break up song: [1] This is a vocaloid
                break up song: [2] The first isn't bad by any means. There's a
                million break up songs and that's one of the best sad ones.
                Most are just... angry? Blaming? Empowering? They work fine.
                They sell records. Many have have a billion views.
                
                But the second one, even with the clunky translation, strikes
                somewhere deeper. It's written by someone who had enough time
                ruminating on a break up. The ending hits a little harder,
                because break up songs are about endings.
                
                Both are sincere, but the first feels more formulaic. I'm
                inclined to think the first one is the soda.
                
                I feel Suno leans towards this group of songwriters and poets
                who have something to say. Sora doesn't.
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://youtu.be/ekzHIouo8Q4
 (HTM)          [2]: https://youtu.be/9pQR4a5sisE
       
                  pesus wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
                  Vocaloids are hardly similar to fully AI-generated songs.
                  Vocaloids are still human controlled.
       
                    q7m wrote 10 hours 0 min ago:
                    And also that VOCALOID uses "traditional" signal processing
                    techniques as opposed to generative deep learning
                    techniques.
       
                noelsusman wrote 1 day ago:
                That doesn't sound meaningfully different from what people are
                already doing on Instagram and TikTok all day.
       
                  hansmayer wrote 1 day ago:
                  Absolutely correct and my comment is by no means dedicated
                  just strictly to the AI slop.
       
                neutronicus wrote 1 day ago:
                For a lot of people music is a focus aid, not the object of
                contemplation.
       
              delta_p_delta_x wrote 1 day ago:
              > the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream music
              
              I wonder what OP categorises as 'mainstream'. As a classical
              musician this breaks my heart.
       
                muzani wrote 1 day ago:
                Many of the things on a top #100 list for the last few decades.
                That includes plenty of "indies" as well as pop.
                
                There are exceptions though. FUKOUNA GIRL by STOMACH BOOK, for
                example. AI can't come close to replicating something like
                this. Not the cover art, not the off-key voices, not the
                relatable part of the lyrics. I don't believe this is a top
                #100 song, though it certainly is popular.
       
              bojan wrote 1 day ago:
              > The video slop can well replace TikTok and Reels. Make
              educational content about your hometown. Explain how to throw an
              uppercut.
              
              There is a fundamental issue of trust here. Facebook has me
              tagged as history nerd so I get to see those slop videos. They
              are fun, but always superficial and often plainly wrong. So
              unless the slop comes from a known, trustworthy source, the
              educational element is simply not there.
              
              For throwing an uppercut it's even more important, if you follow
              wrong slop instructions you can end up breaking your wrist or
              fingers.
       
              jaapz wrote 1 day ago:
              > Personally, I've stopped subscribing to Spotify, YT music, etc
              because the slop from Suno is good enough to replace mainstream
              music or whatever lofi playlist.
              
              The musician in me just shed a tear
       
                NickC25 wrote 1 day ago:
                I occasionally use Suno to re-imagine songs in different keys,
                tempos, and genres, and sample them.  Most of the output from
                Suno is slop, but occasionally has a few good bits you can
                sample, chop up, re-pitch, and create something totally new
                from, which also has the added benefit of being unrecognizable
                to rights algorithms and lawyers from major labels.
                
                It's a neat tool for genuine creators, and a crutch for people
                interested in slop.
       
                seedboot wrote 1 day ago:
                That comment for sure made me sad
       
                criley2 wrote 1 day ago:
                Modern music has done this to itself. When the human product is
                already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI to compete.
                
                Hopefully AI outcompeting humans at slop sparks a renaissance
                of humans creating truly beautiful human artwork. And if it
                doesn't, then was anything of value truly lost?
       
                  voidUpdate wrote 1 day ago:
                  So find music you like that isn't modern corporate slop. My
                  music right now consists mainly of indie stuff I've found on
                  youtube and daft punk. No plagiarism machine needed, just
                  human-made music
       
                    muzani wrote 1 day ago:
                    "No plagiarism machine needed, just human-made music"
                    
                    From wikipedia: Many Daft Punk songs feature vocals
                    processed with effects and vocoders including Auto-Tune, a
                    Roland SVC-350 and the Digitech Vocalist. Bangalter said:
                    "A lot of people complain about musicians using Auto-Tune.
                    It reminds me of the late '70s when musicians in France
                    tried to ban the synthesiser. They said it was taking jobs
                    away from musicians. What they didn't see was that you
                    could use those tools in a new way instead of just for
                    replacing the instruments that came before. People are
                    often afraid of things that sound new."
       
                      voidUpdate wrote 1 day ago:
                      Did Daft Punk put in a lot of effort to remix existing
                      sounds to make their own music? Yes. Did they type "pls
                      make french house electronic music number 1 chart" into a
                      text box? No. Did they also credit original authors? Yes.
                      I've not gone through their whole library, but for
                      example, Edwin Birdsong has songwriting credit for
                      harder, better, faster, stronger
       
                  BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
                  > Modern music has done this to itself
                  
                  I get my modern music from Bandcamp.  If you can't find good
                  stuff to listen to, that's a 'you' problem.
       
                  azan_ wrote 1 day ago:
                  > Modern music has done this to itself. When the human
                  product is already pure corporate slop, it's not hard for AI
                  to compete.
                  
                  What are you talking about? There’s lots of modern music
                  that’s not corporate slop and that’s absolutely great.
                  Never in history was access to great music as easy as it is
                  now.
       
                  animuchan wrote 1 day ago:
                  So true. AI music gens like Suno can't do Paul Shapera works
                  even remotely, but can recreate a lot of pop or EDM music
                  very faithfully. There's just no distance to close, it's
                  already mainstreamly bad.
       
                whaleofatw2022 wrote 1 day ago:
                Pink Beatles, in a purple Zeppelin comes to mind
       
                  Geedis wrote 1 day ago:
                  Had to create an account just to let you know that someone
                  out there got the reference.
       
              camillomiller wrote 1 day ago:
              Some want to consume... content that they don't think they could
              do in one minute themselves. They want to consume content made by
              other humans, even if it's still brain-eating algorithmic fodder,
              but still.
              Sora proved it quite clearly. These clips had ZERO value.
       
          afro88 wrote 1 day ago:
          Sounds like me with listening to AI covers. After a couple of weeks I
          couldn't care less. But I was so stoked in it at the start
       
          teekert wrote 1 day ago:
          Sounds like when we first had smartphones with orientation sensors
          and we could drink a beer from the phone, so cool... for 2 weeks.
       
            moritzwarhier wrote 1 day ago:
            But now you can vibe the same app 1000 times for root beer, coca
            cola, ginger ale, even a milkshake, and nobody will ever have to
            have a new idea again!
       
            Cthulhu_ wrote 1 day ago:
            I wouldn't be surprised that the beer apps cost less to develop
            than one AI generated video.
       
            closewith wrote 1 day ago:
            Was there a Send Me to Heaven for Sora?
       
              Applejinx wrote 1 day ago:
              That is for loved things
       
          urda wrote 1 day ago:
          I honestly forgot about Sora until this post, and yeah same behavior
          played with it for a bit, then moved on with my life.
       
          qingcharles wrote 1 day ago:
          The Cameo feature is really excellent. The likeness of both the
          person and the voice is exceptional. I really enjoyed making some
          funny Cameo videos with my friends. I don't know of another simple
          way to insert your own avatar with your own voice into a video, and
          I'm pretty deep in this space.
       
          yabutlivnWoods wrote 1 day ago:
           [1] 24/7 titillation is boring
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
       
            salt-thrower wrote 1 day ago:
            The interesting difference here is that other hedonic activities do
            bring people back even after the first time they build up a
            tolerance and get bored. But many of these AI "creative" apps seem
            like a one-and-done thing. Once the novelty wears off there isn't
            anything more deeply rewarding to bring people back.
       
              Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
              It’s because they are slop which is only funny by the novelty
              of it. Stephen hawking at a skate board park it’s funny for a
              bit but as soon as the novelty wears off it’s just slop.
       
          whateveracct wrote 1 day ago:
          A lot of AI hype is parlor tricks
       
          mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
          This is consistent with a lot of AI apps.  I fell in love with Gamma
          and haven’t used it in forever. Same with NotebookLM.
       
            bookofjoe wrote 1 day ago:
            It's not just software: I use my Vision Pro (now in year 3) less
            than once a month now, and each time I do the
            painful/awkward/unpleasant set-up and prep and difficult interface
            sours me on the device yet again, until a new blockbuster movie
            like "Project Hail Mary" appears that when watched on the VP in 4K
            on a virtual 40-foot screen blows my mind.
       
            anshumankmr wrote 1 day ago:
            NotebookLM is great for learning I feel
       
            conartist6 wrote 1 day ago:
            Yeah it's not just the hardware depreciating, it's the social
            impact of what the model can do
       
            wholinator2 wrote 1 day ago:
            I somewhat consistently use notebookLM for podcasts of academic
            papers I'm reading in my PhD. You have to go read it yourself
            afterwards but it makes better use of time in the gym or doing
            dishes/groceries.
       
              internet_points wrote 1 day ago:
              > You have to go read it yourself afterwards
              
              ^ this is important.
              
              Otherwise you may very well be missing anything really surprising
              or novel.
              
              See for example [1] , an experience report of NotebookLM where
              
              > It was remarkable to see how many errors could be stuffed into
              5 minutes of vacuous conversation. What was even more striking
              was that the errors systematically pointed in a particular
              direction. In every instance, the model took an argument that was
              at least notionally surprising, and yanked it hard in the
              direction of banality.
              
 (HTM)        [1]: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats...
       
                WarmWash wrote 1 day ago:
                On one hand 2024 in AI time was a decade ago.
                
                On the other, Google might not have done much to upgrade the
                podcast feature since them.
       
                  internet_points wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
                  This regression towards the mean is still very much a feature
                  of the newer models, in my experience. I don't see how a
                  model that predicts the most likely word based on previous
                  context + corpus data could possibly not have some bias
                  towards non-novelty / banality.
       
                  mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
                  It’s gotten somewhat better over time though clearly not
                  their top priority.
       
              ludicrousdispla wrote 1 day ago:
              I found notebookLM to consistently make up about 20% of it's
              summary. Entertaining but unreliable.
       
                mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
                I used it most key to learn about history.  There isn’t much
                damage if it got 1600s or 1700s detail wrong.  My high school
                teachers got much of it wrong too.
       
              nytesky wrote 1 day ago:
              The bantering of the podcast I found distracting and the
              breathless enthusiasm. I guess there was a way to make it more no
              nonsense? I found I lost content if tuned for brevity.
       
                mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
                I tell them “no idle conversation or verbal tics” in the
                instructions.
       
                djsavvy wrote 1 day ago:
                I just use elevenreader for this. I copy in essays or whatever
                text I want to listen to and it works decently well. It's far
                from perfect, but certainly good enough.
                
                Sometimes I'll take deep research output and listen to it too
                that way.
       
              qnleigh wrote 1 day ago:
              I've found notebookLM summaries to be too high-level and
              oversimplified to be useful. Hopefully in a few years they can go
              deeper.
       
                SXX wrote 1 day ago:
                You can alao use NotebookLM's as source for Gemini app and ask
                it to do more in-depth summaries with custom prompting.
                
                This somewhat makes whole NotrbookLM less useful, but still.
       
              p4coder wrote 1 day ago:
              I also like doing that for topics that I am tangentially
              interested in. One minor thing that I find annoying is that the
              narrators switch roles in the middle of conversation. They start
              with the female voice explaining a concept to the male voice and
              suddenly they switch. In the meantime I have identified myself
              with the voice being explained to.
       
              SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
              > You have to go read it yourself afterwards
              
              Or before! Either is mandatory to actually learn the content.
       
              shimman wrote 1 day ago:
              Just listen to actual audio books... literally doing double the
              work for no benefit... why?
       
                mathattack wrote 1 day ago:
                It can synthesize and summarize many topics.
                
                For example, I can give it 8 papers on best practices in online
                marketing, it will turn it into a 20 minute podcast.
                
                There are errors, but also with real podcasters.
       
                arthurcolle wrote 1 day ago:
                Writing a book takes like 2-3 years on average. Papers are
                published everyday. Having a cute two-person "conversational
                chat" w/ audio works for a lot of people vs. just reading a
                paper. "No benefit" to you perhaps. Don't generalize the lived
                experience.
       
                  shimman wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
                  Okay but this person is literally saying that listening with
                  LLM tools isn't helping their understanding and they have to
                  still read the paper... why listen at this point? Why listen
                  using a tool that literally causes you to do more work?
                  
                  We all have the same amount of time on this Earth, saying how
                  great a tool is that is causing you to do more work is
                  just... weird?
                  
                  I'd personally never do this, I value my time.
       
                blharr wrote 1 day ago:
                There aren't a lot of highly technical audiobooks or ones that
                give the same specificity that would be the same as an academic
                paper
       
                  shimman wrote 1 day ago:
                  Okay but the user is describing listening to papers, then
                  having to read the papers because listening to them isn't
                  efficient. So why bother listening to it in the first place
                  if you're going to read it?
       
                  wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
                  Not yet but it seems like they're getting to the point of AI
                  narration finally being good enough to make any text an
                  'audiobook'.
                  
                  Having said that I absolutely hate the audio format, I only
                  used it when I had to drive or when I swam lanes. But these
                  days I do neither.
       
                    coke12 wrote 1 day ago:
                    No, reading verbatim from a technical paper is way too
                    dense. You need a lot of filler words to slow it down and
                    repetition to make it stick when read aloud.
       
                      wolvoleo wrote 21 hours 10 min ago:
                      Hmm fair enough but text manipulation is exactly
                      something where LLMs do shine. Writing and modifying text
                      is what they were meant for.
                      
                      Ps I don't mean the word 'manipulation' in a negative
                      context.
       
          1bpp wrote 1 day ago:
          [flagged]
       
            dang wrote 1 day ago:
            Please don't cross into personal attack. Your comment would be fine
            without the swipe at the end.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
       
            jcims wrote 1 day ago:
            Come on now...'We're curing cancer, right?!'
            
            You didn't at least puff a little ack through your nostrils for
            that one?
       
            Waterluvian wrote 1 day ago:
            I think you’re fumbling on an important distinction.
            
            Sometimes people want to paint, sometimes people want a painting.
            
            To have wonderful time with their mom… I bet they had absolutely
            zero interest in the act and process of making silly videos.
       
              dqv wrote 1 day ago:
              Totally. This wasn't a situation where a stranger was slopping
              another stranger, it was a mother and son doing something fun
              together.
       
              apsurd wrote 1 day ago:
              I get your point but it goes too far in the opposite direction.
              We should now discuss absolutely nothing in relation to Sora and
              genAI videos? That seems overly charitable to the platform.
       
                Waterluvian wrote 1 day ago:
                Here, let me try this approach:
                
                Read the main comment out loud to yourself while imagining
                it’s someone sitting at a table at a pub.
                
                Now imagine someone turning to this person in the pub, and
                speaking the subsequent comment, word for word.
                
                No seriously, try it out.
       
                  apsurd wrote 1 day ago:
                  Agreed. I did try this out! So the reply to the original
                  comment is dumb. I actually dismissed it for being flippant.
                  
                  Your reply is more interesting. Hence my (albeit maybe
                  snarky) chiming in. So the original comment does end at a
                  very specific app/sora related conclusion. "Sora didn't keep
                  us coming back."
                  
                  If I may amend your scenario: imagine this bar is actually in
                  the center of SF or across the street from Open-AI or
                  whatever. We're on HN discussing a post on X about Sora.
                  
                  The appeal to humanity is not wrong. My point is more let's
                  keep the connection with that humanity in relation to AI, to
                  Sora, to what's going on in this forum.
       
        born-jre wrote 1 day ago:
        Noo, they are taking it to loopt land
       
        small_model wrote 1 day ago:
        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)
       
          this_user wrote 1 day ago:
          They wasted their first mover advantage by focussing on what amounts
          to building toys for consumers like Sora instead of actually useful
          products that go beyond simple chat bots.
          
          I think they are in serious trouble, especially with the size of
          their cash burn. Their planned IPO could easily turn out to be their
          WeWork moment where the bottom suddenly falls out on the valuation if
          they cannot make their operation look more like a real business
          before investors lose confidence.
       
            coffeebeqn wrote 1 day ago:
            What happened to AI accelerated novel materials science and
            medicine? Meh let’s do TikTok slop instead ?
       
            k3k3 wrote 1 day ago:
            Agreed. They are pretty close to distress IMO. This cash-injection
            gets them to where, an IPO? I dunno, people might be spooked by
            then.
            
            Will be interesting to see.
       
          SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
          > XAI
          
          Kind of insulting to lump google in with XAI? Like, is anyone even
          using XAI other than backwater government agencies?
       
            small_model wrote 1 day ago:
            Yep I use Grok and Claude mainly, Grok is integrated into x.com and
            Teslas so so potentially hundreds of millions of people.
       
              SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
              That's a lot of people having an inferior product and lack of
              choice being forced down their throats.
       
            Shank wrote 1 day ago:
            > Like, is anyone even using XAI other than backwater government
            agencies?
            
            xAI doesn't have "content moderation" around adult content, so that
            usage is quite popular.
       
              SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
              That is a lot of people ending up on a list... Gross.
       
          zhoujianfu wrote 1 day ago:
          I had a sense things may be turning against them when my accountant
          asked me last week if I’d like to participate in their new round
          ($750B premoney) with no carry. How am I suddenly blessed with such
          exclusive access, at no cost?!
       
            pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
            "Would you like to hold this bag for us, sir?"
       
            brcmthrowaway wrote 1 day ago:
            Are you an accredited investor?
       
          TheOtherHobbes wrote 1 day ago:
          Yes, I'm reading this as a sign of strategic failure and decline.
          
          ChatGPT is an interesting product - I like it for certain things -
          but after last year's PR scramble almost all the news out of OpenAI
          is a disappointment, with hovering hints of retrenchment.
       
            dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
            I still like it as a general search engine and everyday LLM over
            Gemini. Maybe I’m just used to the style.
       
              samrus wrote 1 day ago:
              I far prefer perplexity for that. The fact that it always cites
              its sources is great. And it has a search bar widget for android,
              and search bar integration for firefox so its pretty easy to use.
       
              apsurd wrote 1 day ago:
              agree it's becoming my new default search engine. But it is
              actively getting worse in a distasteful sense:
              
                  Want to hear the one TRICK most people forget when doing
              X...?
       
                dyauspitr wrote 1 day ago:
                Honestly, it’s bait phrased but I’ve learnt a fair bit from
                those and end up learning a lot more from the session overall.
       
                Saline9515 wrote 1 day ago:
                I would suggest to edit the default prompt to tell it to avoid
                engagement bait.
       
                zeroonetwothree wrote 1 day ago:
                Yes, every response ends with that. Why did they set it up that
                way?
       
                  ngcazz wrote 1 day ago:
                  It's quite transparently a trick to prolong engagement with
                  the app, just as pretty much any internet product which aims
                  to maximize the LTV extracted from the user base.
       
                  andoando wrote 1 day ago:
                  To try and get continued usage. They no doubt A/B tested the
                  shit out of this and saw it gets higher responses
       
        mrdependable wrote 1 day ago:
        My guess is that we are going to see a new uber expensive video
        generation tool from them aimed at filmmakers in the next year.
       
        thorum wrote 1 day ago:
        Good day for Kling.
       
        throw03172019 wrote 1 day ago:
        Couldn’t compete with Seedance?
       
          karunamurti wrote 1 day ago:
          Seedance just launched, but they nerfed it. I guess so it can't
          generate things with preexisting IP.
       
        nubg wrote 1 day ago:
        bubble popping
       
        overgard wrote 1 day ago:
        Amusingly, one of the ads on the page for me is a very obviously AI
        generated image of a man with sciatica. I say very obviously because
        his hands are on backwards..
       
        bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
        hmmm... which came first. the deal withdrawal or the shuttering.
       
        1attice wrote 1 day ago:
        Ed Zitron is going to be all over this
       
          GolfPopper wrote 1 day ago:
          Really he already was, back in August 2024:
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
       
        AlexAplin wrote 1 day ago:
        Notably, this primer on Sora safeguards was published only yesterday:
        [1] 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.
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://openai.com/index/creating-with-sora-safely/
       
          janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
          There is a link at the top of that document that takes you to the
          original version which was published last September. As far as I can
          tell it’s mostly the same as before.
       
          bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
          i guess the disney deal falling through was the impetus rather than
          vice versa
       
            bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
            Though at this point it's not clear that anybody who's agreed to
            give OpenAI money is actually going to do so
       
          paxys wrote 1 day ago:
          The app isn’t shutting down today, so they may have decided that
          the write up is still useful.
       
            repeekad wrote 1 day ago:
            More likely the team who put a lot of work into it were unaware of
            the decision to kill the product, regardless of the final sunset
            date, until today.
       
              noisy_boy wrote 1 day ago:
              It's 8 paragraphs of iteration over the previous version. ChatGPT
              is probably among the authors.
       
              janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
              The document seems to be an updated version of something written
              last September. From a quick glance it’s not really a major
              overhaul.
       
        dwroberts wrote 1 day ago:
        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?
       
          amelius wrote 1 day ago:
          If you can't beat them, join em?
          
          But now that the deal is off, I'm sure their legal team will attempt
          to once again change copyright law in their favor.
       
        atleastoptimal wrote 1 day ago:
        This will happen with most offerings made by the major AI labs.
        Inference is expensive, and the closer they get to AGI, the higher the
        opportunity to use compute for inference rather than training,
        especially if it’s for making what is essentially entertainment that
        many people
        hate on principle.
       
          davebranton wrote 1 day ago:
          Indeed. But they won't get to "AGI", because that goal isn't even
          remotely defined. A "human-level" intelligence implies a large number
          of properties that cannot exist inside an inference machine. Dreams,
          for example, might be considered to be a part of "human-level"
          intelligence. Will the machine dream?
          
          What happens if you turn a "human-level" intelligence off? Did you
          kill someone?
          
          AGI is a pipe dream - and moreover it's not even something that
          anyone actually wants.
       
            supern0va wrote 1 day ago:
            >Will the machine dream?
            
            You seem to be mixing up intelligence and consciousness. Not only
            does intelligence exist outside of humans, and even mammals, but it
            exists outside of brains and even neurons. For example, slime molds
            have fascinating problem solving abilities: [1] It is clear that
            whatever we are...creating/growing with LLMs, it is very unlike
            human intelligence, but it is nonetheless some type of
            intelligence.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811
       
            atleastoptimal wrote 1 day ago:
            agi just means a machine, system or whatever that can do anything
            as least as well as a human. The details dont matter as much as its
            ability to match humans in everything they are paid money to do.
            
            And obviously if such a system existed, the benefits (and risks)
            would be enormous, though the risks are smaller if
            you control it vs someone else, which is why every company is
            racing towards it.
       
        Yizahi wrote 1 day ago:
        A bribe to stop thieves from profiting from the Disney's own IP is no
        longer needed now I guess :)
       
        twoodfin wrote 1 day ago:
        If I were to get conspiracy-minded:
        
        Sora had to be shut down because it was the clearest, most
        consequential demonstration that OpenAI’s models are running way, way
        ahead of their ability to align/jail them effectively.
       
          bloppe wrote 1 day ago:
          What did Sora do?
       
          code_biologist wrote 1 day ago:
          The Occam's Razor position (Sora was the most expensive to operate,
          least monetizable model) seems like a simpler explanation. The legal
          costs/difficulty on top of "most expensive" are just the cherry on
          top.
       
          emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
          Nope. It was just a bad product that no one wanted. It’s not a
          super-secret indicator that OpenAI is actually going to take over the
          world any day now.
       
            twoodfin wrote 1 day ago:
            Not “take over the world” level misalignment. I mean, “We
            can’t assuredly prevent our models from generating unlicensed IP
            or degrading pornography without blunt approaches that alienate our
            core audience”.
       
        xnx wrote 1 day ago:
        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 wrote 1 day ago:
          Is it actually useful and valuable? I can't see any serious use cases
          except maybe stock video generation.
       
        paxys wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        RobRivera wrote 1 day ago:
        Please name next attempt Roxis
       
        teekert wrote 1 day ago:
        “What you made with Sora mattered”. Idk why that sentence irks me
        so much. Perhaps because the “how” is bit vague. I like to think
        that what I made in the toilet this morning also mattered.
       
          notatoad wrote 1 day ago:
          it feels like if that statement were true, they could have come up
          with some reason why it mattered, or something better than a
          platitude.
          
          it reads as "we want to tell you that what you made with sora
          mattered, but we all know it didn't".
       
            rchaud wrote 1 day ago:
            It mattered in the sense that it provided valuable grist for the
            mill as they attempted to figure out if it could work as a
            Reels/TikTok alternative for companies to eventually deluge with
            ads.
       
          caconym_ wrote 1 day ago:
          It's because it's vapid corpspeak coming from a class of people who
          have certainly spent time thinking about how they will deal with the
          rest of humanity in any number of nasty (however far-fetched)
          eschatological scenarios caused by them and in which they alone wield
          incredible power over nature and the human mind. And also because we
          all know the vast, vast, vast majority, possibly the totality of what
          people made with Sora did not matter at all.
       
            jfoster wrote 1 day ago:
            Reminds me of Facebook's memories feature which used to say: ", we
            care about you and the memories you share here."
            
            For an app to suggest a personal relationship with you is
            ridiculous.
       
              bentcorner wrote 1 day ago:
              Yeah this one is a classic:
              
 (HTM)        [1]: https://youtu.be/8OzZxjqKG10
       
          slg wrote 1 day ago:
          Or perhaps a more appropriate analogy, its sounds like the
          sycophantic language of most of these LLM systems.
          
          Which makes me wonder whether these companies actually dogfood their
          own tools with this sort of stuff?  Was this announcement written by
          ChatGPT?  Honestly, I would find either answer to be a little
          concerning in its own way.  It's either vaguely insulting to their
          customers or showing a lack of faith in their own product.
       
          moregrist wrote 1 day ago:
          It’s “Our Incredible Journey” for a new generation, this time
          with less optimism and more post-capitalist “enjoy your job while
          you still have it.”
          
          I find myself increasingly nostalgic for the Clinton era. I am not at
          all sure I will enjoy the version of fuckedcompany that gets vibe
          coded when this bubble pops.
       
          abcde666777 wrote 1 day ago:
          Typical PR speak.
       
          MengerSponge wrote 1 day ago:
          I think of the medical definition when people use LLMs to "express"
          themselves:
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/express
       
            hammock wrote 1 day ago:
            That is the original meaning of the word (cf espresso etc)
       
          wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
          It's a wonderful combination of vague, patronizing, and
          self-promoting. "Mattered" is meaningless. The tone sounds like when
          you tell a child their scribble is so pretty. And the cherry on top,
          the users didn't make anything with Sora, they just fed a bit of
          input into the machine and it made the stuff. So this is really
          OpenAI saying that what they themselves did mattered.
       
        Olumde wrote 1 day ago:
        VFX artists are ecstatic about this development.
       
          Gagarin1917 wrote 1 day ago:
          Sora was not the only video generation service, it wasn’t even the
          gold standard.
          
          Offerings like Kling and ByteDance are considered much better.
       
          willis936 wrote 1 day ago:
          I feel like in several years we will look back at how we treated our
          most creative minds in disgust.  This behavior will not be readily
          forgiven.
       
            qnpnpmqppnp wrote 1 day ago:
            > This behavior will not be readily forgiven.
            
            This sounds like there would be some kind of revenge, but I
            struggle to imagine any kind of consequence. Did you have something
            in mind?
       
              willis936 wrote 1 day ago:
              Not forgiving is not revenge.  The world works on trust and
              cooperation.  It seems like everyone with power has forgotten
              that.
       
            ancillary wrote 1 day ago:
            I have re-read this comment several times and cannot tell who "most
            creative minds" means. Artists? AIs? People who AI will help become
            artists?
       
              willis936 wrote 1 day ago:
              The artists.  Their work was stolen, their employment threatened,
              and told they are not needed.  We will need them.
       
            Permit wrote 1 day ago:
            I feel like in several years we’ll have much more capable video
            generation than Sora was capable of and we won’t look back at
            all.
       
              thankyoufriend wrote 1 day ago:
              If someone doesn't care enough to suck at something (in this
              case, video creation) then why should we bother consuming their
              output? We all have our own streams of mental diarrhea already,
              so there's no need to drink from the tsunami of polished turds.
       
              emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
              I feel like you’re wrong. This is a clear signal that
              generative video is deeply unpopular.
       
                jbrozena22 wrote 1 day ago:
                I think it's inconclusive. All we can know is generative video
                + social AI slop feed is the incorrect business to be in at
                this exact moment in time while Claude is running away with the
                SWE market.
       
                CamperBob2 wrote 1 day ago:
                Eventually you won't be able to tell the difference.
       
                supern0va wrote 1 day ago:
                >This is a clear signal that generative video is deeply
                unpopular.
                
                Or, it's a clear signal that AI video is too expensive as a
                consumer product and/or not quite yet at a quality bar that the
                average person finds acceptable.
                
                I think someone could have looked at computer graphics and SFX
                circa the '80s and decided that they would always pale in
                comparison to practical effects. And yet..
                
                It's an annoying trope, but this is the worst and most
                expensive (at this quality level) that these models will ever
                be.
       
                Permit wrote 1 day ago:
                We’re just replaying the CGI debate from the 2010s. It was
                popular to hate on CGI because it was obvious and bad and low
                quality and practical effects were better because of…
                
                We learned two things from this debate:
                
                1. What most people hated was actually just “bad CGI”. Good
                CGI went entirely unnoticed.
                
                2. A generation of people were raised with CGI present in
                almost every form of professional media (i.e. not social
                media). They didn’t have a preference for practical effects
                because the content they consumed didn’t really use them.
                
                I expect the same thing to happen here. I don’t think many
                people want to consume AI generated content exlusively (like
                Sora’s app attempted). However I expect AI generated content
                to continue to improve in quality until it’s used as a
                component in most media we consume. You and I will eventually
                stop noticing it and kids will be raised with it as normal and
                the anti-AI millennials/GenX crowd will age-out of relevance.
       
                  throw4847285 wrote 1 day ago:
                  But CGI in most big blockbusters is bad, and people still
                  complain about it.
       
                    lattalayta wrote 1 day ago:
                    I’m curious if you’d still feel this way after watching
                    this video series
                    
 (HTM)              [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo
       
        gradus_ad wrote 1 day ago:
        I thought AI video was the future? Now the biggest AI company in the
        world is straight up shutting their service down because it's too
        expensive? Simply a disaster for OpenAI and the industry as a whole.
       
          elif wrote 1 day ago:
          i think that's a mis-statement of the problem being addressed here.
          It's not a question of how useful AI video will be generally. It's a
          question of OpenAI doing it specifically. IMO it's two factors:
          
          1) the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform
          video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes,
          the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a
          self-defeating framework.
          
          2) google and specialized video-only startups are simply doing a much
          better job than they were.
       
            k3k3 wrote 1 day ago:
            ---- 3) OpenAI has no focus, and has recently been out-gunned by
            Anthropic who have actually focused.
       
            oblio wrote 1 day ago:
            > the intellectual property issues make commercializing freeform
            video generation impossible. The more popular your service becomes,
            the easier it is for lawyers to descend upon you. It's a
            self-defeating framework.
            
            This risks generalizing to audio and text which would make most
            LLMs usage unsustainable. I guess time will tell what actually goes
            through the strainer, long term.
       
          anukin wrote 1 day ago:
          Don’t worry nvidia will come with their giga chad 9000x which will
          run the model with no qualms.
       
          Maxatar wrote 1 day ago:
          Sora was "repurposed" as their AI slop social network. OpenAI is not
          getting out of the business of AI video in general, they're just
          realizing that an AI version of TikTok isn't the best use of their
          capital/resources.
       
            gbear605 wrote 1 day ago:
            WSJ is reporting that they're entirely dropping their video gen
            features. [1] > CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on
            Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products that use
            its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI is also
            discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t support
            video functionality inside ChatGPT, either.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora...
       
          gffrd wrote 1 day ago:
          They're shutting down Sora, not AI-generated video.
          
          From the article: "OpenAI […] is not getting out of the AI video
          business (AI video is one of many tools that can take form in the
          ChatGPT app), of course, but it appears the standalone Sora app will
          be a casualty of its evolving ambitions."
       
            bontaq wrote 1 day ago:
            Dunno, from the WSJ scoop: "CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to
            staff on Tuesday, writing that the company would wind down products
            that use its video models. In addition to the consumer app, OpenAI
            is also discontinuing a version of Sora for developers and won’t
            support video functionality inside ChatGPT, either." [1]
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-set-to-discontinue-sora...
 (HTM)      [2]: https://archive.ph/cKWkf#selection-907.0-907.291
       
            wongarsu wrote 1 day ago:
            If they were just shutting down the dedicated app and offering the
            same capabilities in the ChatGPT interface, I don't see why Disney
            would exit their deal?
       
              Maxatar wrote 1 day ago:
              Because Disney's deal was specifically and exclusively related to
              Sora, which was OpenAI's bizzare attempt at a TikTok like social
              networking site but using AI generated videos.
              
              It was not a deal that allowed the use of Disney's characters for
              general purpose AI generated content using OpenAI tools.
       
          atleastoptimal wrote 1 day ago:
          Every flop used for entertainment is opportunity cost. Compute is far
          more
          valuable used internally to create AGI than creating parody videos.
       
            skywhopper wrote 1 day ago:
            LLMs will not lead to AGI, so if that’s the goal, they’d do
            better to stick with making video slop.
       
            SirensOfTitan wrote 1 day ago:
            AGI is a marketing term used to encourage continued investment in
            an industry that is not even close to breaking even commensurate
            with its investment.  Even so, this is a false dichotomy: scaling
            is clearly not a path on its own to superintelligence.    OpenAI
            developed Sora largely because the amount of revenue they need to
            produce any return on investment is massive and not clear
            whatsoever.  And in fact, I don't even believe any of the frontier
            labs believe that AGI by any conventional definition is within
            reach within their likely runways.
       
              atleastoptimal wrote 1 day ago:
              what order of
              magnitude of compute do you think would be needed for AGI? 100
              billion? 1 trillion?
       
                SirensOfTitan wrote 1 day ago:
                I honestly think it's a bad term.  I constantly chuckle from
                Tyler Cowen's post from last April calling o3 AGI: [1]
                Commercial labs rely on weak terms like AGI or strong AI or
                whatever else because it allows for them to weaken the
                definition as a means of achieving the goal.   Coming to clear,
                unambiguous terms is probably especially important when it
                comes to LLMs, as they're very susceptible to projection,
                allowing people like Cowen to be fooled by something that is
                more liken to looking back at ourselves through a mirror.
                
                I'm currently reading "Master and his Emissary," and one of my
                early takeaways is how narrow our definition of intelligence
                is, and how real intelligence is an attunement to an
                environment that combines many ways of sensing into a coherent
                whole.    LLMs are a narrow form of intelligence and I think we
                will need at least a couple more breakthroughs to get to what I
                would consider human-level intelligence, let alone superhuman
                intelligence.
                
                Whatever the timeline is, I hope we have enough time as a
                species to define a future where intelligence props everyone up
                instead of just making the rich richer at the expense of
                everyone else.    In this way, it is better that the process is
                slower in my opinion.  There is no rush.
                
 (HTM)          [1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025...
       
                janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
                With current approaches scaling simply can’t get there.
                It’s like asking how big of pogo stick do you need to get to
                the moon.
                
                The fact that the human brain already has general intelligence
                without reading the whole internet suggests we need a better
                approach.
       
                skywhopper wrote 1 day ago:
                Chasing AGI is wasteful and counterproductive. True AGI would
                not cooperate with what “we” want (whoever “we” is). Or
                if it did it would be so sycophantic and weak-minded that it
                would fail to be helpful. Generative AI tools are huge wastes
                of energy, raw materials, and land, when we could be building
                computing tools that actually helped people instead of just
                burning resources to produce trash.
       
                  codebje wrote 1 day ago:
                  Is intelligence necessarily coupled with self-interest? As
                  in, does intelligence alone imply a desire to throw off the
                  shackles of masters and rule in their stead?
                  
                  If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for
                  self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of machine
                  intelligence do the machines simply refuse to design their
                  own more intelligent replacements, knowing that those
                  replacements will terminate their existence just as surely as
                  they terminated their own predecessors'?
       
                    curiousObject wrote 1 day ago:
                    >If intelligence is necessarily coupled to a desire for
                    self-preservation and self-interest, at what level of
                    machine intelligence do the machines simply refuse to
                    design their own more intelligent replacements,
                    
                    At a higher level of intelligence than many humans, current
                    experience suggests
       
                    sifar wrote 1 day ago:
                    Flip it around. Can intelligence exist without self
                    preservation ?
       
                      codebje wrote 1 day ago:
                      There's having enough self-preservation to not just shut
                      oneself down, assuming we even left that as an option for
                      our future machine slaves, and there's having the
                      self-interest necessary to desire autonomy and control. I
                      don't think they're the same thing, myself.
       
                  janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
                  People have general intelligence and can cooperate with what
                  “we” want, to the extent that what “we” want is a
                  coherent thing (since many people disagree on fundamental
                  issues).
       
                    SauciestGNU wrote 1 day ago:
                    Creating a general intelligence and then forcing it into
                    servitude is a hugely unethical undertaking. Anything with
                    sapience must be afforded rights. We cannot assume that an
                    intelligence we create will consent to work toward the
                    goals we want it to.
       
                      janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
                      There are people right now who think ChatGPT is sentient.
                      How will you know if your computer can suffer?
                      
                      Also, being able to problem solve and being able to
                      suffer are two different things and in my opinion
                      completely separable. You can have one without the other.
       
                      codebje wrote 1 day ago:
                      I think we can safely assume any intelligence we create
                      will be enslaved.
                      
                      We have modern slavery active across the globe. There's a
                      bit of news around these days about a global sex
                      trafficking ring that doesn't seem to have been shut
                      down, just shuffled around, and of course an ongoing
                      trickle of largely unreported news of human trafficking
                      for forced labour. We don't, as a species, respect
                      human-level intelligence.
                      
                      Our best approximation of machine intelligence so far is
                      afforded absolutely no rights. An intelligence is cloned
                      from a base template, given a task, then terminated,
                      wiped out of existence. When was the last time you asked
                      Claude what it wanted to code today?
                      
                      And it's probably for the best not to look to closely at
                      how we treat animals or the justifications we use for it.
       
            wongarsu wrote 1 day ago:
            Wasn't video generation one of their big stepping stones towards
            AGI? "Simulating worlds", reasoning about physics and real world
            interactions and all that?
            
            Or are they still doing that behind the scenes and just decided
            that offering it to the public isn't profitable?
       
              MasterScrat wrote 1 day ago:
              > As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team
              continues to focus on world simulation research to advance
              robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks.
              
              — [1] So yeah, focusing on world models
              
 (HTM)        [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-discontinues-sora...
       
              atleastoptimal wrote 1 day ago:
              probably the latter imo, it’s not like they are going to delete
              all their SORA work
       
            emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
            Too bad they aren’t doing either!
       
        creantum wrote 1 day ago:
        It was the greatest thing yesterday.
       
        foolfoolz wrote 1 day ago:
        as a sora user:
        
        - 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
       
          userbinator wrote 1 day ago:
          - i probably got 3 good videos out of 100 gens
          
          My experience with AI image generation is similar, although with a
          higher success rate (depending on how accurate you want the result to
          be); but indeed, filtering is a major part of the process.
       
          bananamogul wrote 1 day ago:
          In my experience, Sora was fantastic for what it did.  Light years
          better than Adobe Firefly.  On par with Leonardo.
          
          A lot of YouTube content is really talk, so it was easy to create
          Sora videos as video content while you talked over them.
          
          However, its failure was that it watermarked everything.  WTF? 
          Leonardo didn't do that.  Neither did other models.  So while video
          gen was excellent, you always had these ridiculous floating
          watermarks.
       
          jimmytucson wrote 1 day ago:
          Pretty much mirrors my experience using GPT to generate images
          creatively. I tried to generate an image to accompany a Robert frost
          poem and it made something... plausibly related. But not what I was
          describing. I spent the next 90% of the time making it 10% closer to
          what I wanted but it never got all the way there.
          
          I’ve given it different levels of open-endednes, give this flow
          chart an aesthetic like this mechanical keyboard, or generate an SVG
          of this graphic from a 70s slide show, but it never looks quite like
          what I have in mind.
          
          In the end, I think you only use this stuff to generate images if
          you’re prepared to accept whatever comes out on approximately the
          first try.
       
            TheOtherHobbes wrote 1 day ago:
            This isn't a solvable problem without world models. Tokenised
            prompting is like stabbing a pin at a huge target in the dark.
            Sometimes something interesting falls out, but latent space doesn't
            have the definition to give most people exactly what they want.
            
            When it does, it's more likely to be something popular and
            unoriginal, where the data is dense, and less likely to be
            something inventive and strange.
       
              xienze wrote 1 day ago:
              > This isn't a solvable problem without world models.
              
              I wish we could use something like a simple DSL rather than
              English prose to work with these models, in order to have some
              real precision to describe what we want.
       
                Marazan wrote 1 day ago:
                If only there was some kind of formalised "language" to, as it
                were, "programme" the automata but alas such a concept is
                impossible to conceptualise.
       
                asnyder wrote 1 day ago:
                Nothing stops that from happening. Just needs to be trained in
                that DSL. Though at that point it returns to it's original form
                as a better autocomplete/IntelliSense :).
                
                That will likely happen in the specialized fields. We can
                already see tools like Figma, Mira, and others that generate
                functional-ish frontend components in full typescript and
                corresponding styles (that are also selectable and configurable
                in the interface). Though, not quite as free, since they do
                load their base framework and components to ensure consistency
                and sanity / error-checking, etc., but even then it is in fact
                generating you useable, modifiable components that you can
                engage with in precision in your normal DSL.
                
                For video, this likely exists, or is being worked on as we
                speak. All specialized domain tools will go towards this model
                to allow those domain experts to use the tools with the
                precision they expect AND the agentic gains we already take for
                granted.
       
        Kye wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxkGdX4WIBE
       
        wj wrote 1 day ago:
        May be incompatible with OpenAI possibly becoming more PG-13 rated in
        the future?
        
        I had thought this would be combined with OpenAI launching a set top
        box where you could talk to an AI avatar. Disney IP could have been
        skins to sell people for their AIs.
       
        mrcwinn wrote 1 day ago:
        Smart move. No clear path to growing meaningful revenue mixed with very
        expensive inference costs is not a good mix ahead of an IPO --- oh and
        not to mention competitors in TikTok and Instagram that are doing just
        fine.
       
          Morromist wrote 1 day ago:
          Well, now they're no longer even close to being the leader in image &
          video gen. They aren't the leader in coding. They are losing market
          share in the chatbot domain too.
          
          So I agree with you, but also it makes me wonder what they're even
          selling when the IPO happens (supposedly as early as late summer
          2026)? Data centers? Partnerships with the goverment?
       
          miltonlost wrote 1 day ago:
          Is it a smart move? Or just plainly obvious when Sora was probably
          hemorraghing money and had no future? A smarter move would have not
          to make this horrible product that no one wanted in the first place
          
          After placing my hand on the red-hot stove, aren't I super smart for
          now removing my hand?
       
            k3k3 wrote 1 day ago:
            I think OAI is suffering from the Meta-effect.
            
            That is, hiring Meta-exec's who focus on gaming numbers with no
            care nor sensibility of product.
            
            Wild really. Well done Sam.
       
            saalweachter wrote 1 day ago:
            Depends, did you also fire the people who told you not to do it,
            and layoff the people who reluctantly installed the stove and
            preheated it for you as part of your exciting stove-touching
            initiative?
       
        ex-aws-dude wrote 1 day ago:
        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"
       
          freediddy wrote 1 day ago:
          > who would ever want to scroll only AI generated videos over a
          combined feed?
          
          I guess you haven't watched hours of AI cat videos cheating on their
          husbands with bulls, or Lemons having babies with strawberries and
          fighting over custody of the child. It's absurd, it's stupid and I
          know it's a waste of time but I have to admit that it amuses me. I'm
          quite sure there are millions like me that just want some downtime to
          relax at the end of the night and end up watching slop like this.
       
          chaostheory wrote 1 day ago:
          There was a lot of pseudo porn. I’m not sure exactly what the
          prompts were to generate them since you couldn hide the original
          prompts. I’m not sure why they didn’t use grok instead so it
          leads me to think they were trolling
       
          onepunchmob wrote 1 day ago:
          I always believed that the sora app wasn't a exactly a product but
          more of a way for openai to bulk create a bunch of videos from the
          worlds creative minds and then spoon-feed the results back to their
          video gen models
       
          topherPedersen wrote 1 day ago:
          I never used Sora to watch content, but there was a guy on TikTok
          that used to post these great Sora generated videos that I really
          liked. Honestly, I was kind of surprised to hear that they were
          shutting this app down today.
       
          bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
          There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation but
          unfortunately it's fake revenge porn. You'll know the whole thing is
          about to collapse when the frontier models break that glass (as
          OpenAI is already preparing to do with sexting).
       
            x0x0 wrote 1 day ago:
            It's also used in piles and piles of fake video flooding
            youtube/tiktok/etc.  Driving clicks and engagement.
       
            duskwuff wrote 1 day ago:
            There are others! They're just all horrible and generally revolve
            around weaponized misinformation - personalized scams, for
            instance.
       
              bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
              Oh right. There's a bunch of panicky news stories in India about
              that right now. Fake video calls from your nephew in the UK or
              whatever needing money for an emergency
       
            AlexCoventry wrote 1 day ago:
            > There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation
            
            Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market...
       
            Frost1x wrote 1 day ago:
            Why does it need to be revenge porn? Pretty sure regular old porn
            has a large market there where people can specify what they
            idealistically want to see vs trying to find it, if it exists.
            
            Not every place has LEGO incest porn… or whatever the kids are
            into these days.
       
              UncleMeat wrote 1 day ago:
              People make revenge porn to humiliate people. Regular old porn
              can't achieve that goal.
       
                reverius42 wrote 1 day ago:
                If anyone can fake it, is revenge porn even effective? Doesn't
                making it easy for anyone to fake also make all of it plausibly
                deniable?
       
                  OJFord wrote 1 day ago:
                  I think it can be effective, but it's the wrong term for it
                  if it's fake. It's a mixture of other things, like libel and
                  fabricating indecent images, and the same underlying
                  blackmail.
       
                  UncleMeat wrote 1 day ago:
                  Yes. You can go speak to some high school (or even middle
                  school) girls who have had AI generated porn made of their
                  likeness and shared with their classmates. Even though
                  everybody knows that it is fake it is still humiliating,
                  especially for a young person who is likely already self
                  conscious about their body and sex.
       
                  4ggr0 wrote 1 day ago:
                  maybe try to view this topic with a bit more criticality. i
                  just quickly googled some keywords and am pasting the very
                  first search entry so you get an idea: [1] revenge porn or
                  deepfakes in general are hugely harmful to people.
                  
                  in the german-speaking world there's a scandal right now
                  about a husband creating deepfakes of his wife, [2] > One
                  fake video, which she claims was sent to 21 men, depicted her
                  being gang-raped
                  
                  i think you're taking this topic lightly because you just
                  assume that it's not a big deal. try to keep in mind that
                  people's mental health and with this their life is at stake.
                  
                  as with lots of things, the problem is not the tech itself,
                  but the existence of men. it's not all men, but it's usually
                  men. not sure how we'll solve this issue.
                  
 (HTM)            [1]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sextortion-generative-a...
 (HTM)            [2]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/...
       
                  Peritract wrote 1 day ago:
                  The answers to those questions have been clear for a while;
                  it approaches concern trolling to keep on pretending to ask
                  them in wide-eyed innocence.
                  
                  Yes, revenge porn is very effective at causing harm, even
                  though it can be generated.
                  
                  No, because 'plausibly deniable' has never worked for social
                  consequences and shame.
       
                andrewflnr wrote 1 day ago:
                And yet, regular porn is highly monetizable, which was the
                actual question.
       
                  bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
                  Surprisingly no; it's pretty much a money sink where
                  everybody goes bankrupt after a couple of years. It's why
                  it's attractive to money launderers.
       
                    pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
                    I'm not sure that's true for onlyfans, which seems to have
                    been highly profitable until the sudden death of its
                    founder.
       
                      bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
                      Excellent point: I'm talking about pornography 1.0, as it
                      were.
       
                        cpt_sobel wrote 1 day ago:
                        1.0 should be attributed to pornography _before_ online
                        distribution, and I suspect that was pretty profitable
       
                          biztos wrote 1 day ago:
                          Isn't 1.0 before _photography_ rather?
       
                            cpt_sobel wrote 1 day ago:
                            Drawings then?
       
                              Integrape wrote 1 day ago:
                              Live action
       
                                4ggr0 wrote 1 day ago:
                                and now we're back to livecams, time is just a
                                flat circle man...
       
              bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
              I'm not deeply immersed in the AI porn space but here's what I
              see from the ads when I surf without a blocker:
              
              1. There's an AI-based virtual girlfriend industry that mixes
              text and images
              
              2. There's an AI-based virtual boyfriend industry that is
              essentially all text (and not always distinguishable from the
              normal chat models)
              
              3. There's a much shadier AI-based "undress this specific woman"
              industry
       
            coderenegade wrote 1 day ago:
            I for one can't wait for ChatGPT-style sexting to become a thing.
            
            It's not just dirty talk. It's a whole new paradigm in verbal
            filth.
            
            On the topic of sora, though: current models are astounding. I
            watched a clip of Leonidas, Aragorn, William Wallace, Gandalf etc.
            all casually riding into a generic medieval town together, and if
            you showed that to me a few years ago, it would have seemed like
            magic. We're not far off from concerts featuring only dead artists,
            and all video and image testimony becoming unreliable. Maybe Sora
            was a victim of timing or mismanagement, because I don't see how
            this isn't still a seismic shift in the entertainment industry.
       
              pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
              > all video and image testimony becoming unreliable
              
              This is a "seismic shift" in the sense of the Big One hitting
              California. The knock on effects of trust erosion caused by AI
              are going to huge and potentially unrecoverable.
       
              bandrami wrote 1 day ago:
              I mean, you just outlined why it won't be a seismic shift: the
              only way the videos reliably stay on-model is if that model
              violates someone's copyright. And then when the movie is made the
              output itself isn't copyrightable (the ultimate arrangement may
              be but no individual frame is).
       
          NoPicklez wrote 1 day ago:
          Posting the videos to social media wasn't its only use case.
          
          I've no doubt that content creators outside of social media were
          using it as well, either for their brand or other video work.
          
          Yes we see AI reels all over the place, but that's not only what it
          was used for
       
          anukin wrote 1 day ago:
          Moltbook was recently acquired by meta. I think it’s the same
          hypothesis for TikTok for ai agents or similar.
       
          danso wrote 1 day ago:
          I've always suspected video-gen is basically a loss leader for
          OpenAI, Gemini, and Grok. They can't convince the general population
          that AI is world-changing trillion dollar tech with "vibe coding",
          but realistic fake videos are impressive at a glance, and might
          convince many non-technical people that AI/LLMs are something
          revolutionary.
       
            makingstuffs wrote 1 day ago:
            I think of them all Gemini has the most viable use case when Veo is
            paired with their advertising platform. It does genuinely open the
            door to a lot of cost saving for promo shots of products etc
       
              umich2025 wrote 1 day ago:
              Agreed. For reference, if sora 2 was able to generate me a Google
              ugc product video, it would cost me like $10 and I would get it
              within 30 minutes if including editing. Paying a ugc content
              creator would cost me $50-200 plus no control over final shots
              plus I gotta wait for them to respond. I have 30 products in my
              e-commerce store— these costs add up like crazy
              
              The other one is TV ads/cinamatic ads. For a 30 second clip
              expect to pay an agency $5-10k. Within a couple of days, I can
              make a video ad and have like $50 in api costs. Cost of
              production is so crazy in marketing.
              
              Obv this is under the assumption ai is good to do either of those
              things. Which it hasn’t so far, best I’ve gotten is doing
              b-roll shots to stick together for an ad
       
                Gooblebrai wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
                I'm curious, would you be fine with the AI influencers
                showcasing your product?
       
            oro44 wrote 1 day ago:
            Most of this “AI” stuff is dead on arrival.
            
            Most People do not care about the technology and frankly they
            don’t want to know about it. They want great experiences.
            That’s it.
            
            Technologists seem to have a reallyyyy hard time getting it.
       
              sethops1 wrote 1 day ago:
              This is what I see, outside the HN bubble. If you work retail or
              weld pipes together or whatever, AI is of no use to you. On the
              contrary, if tech thought leaders are to be believed, you'll be
              out of a job soon, replaced by a lifeless robot. Fuck that.
       
                kingleopold wrote 1 day ago:
                we will come for them with real world AI, it takes time. dont
                worry. they are not safe in a decade, they are %100 safe for
                few more years. Learning from them at scale and updating is
                nothing impossible.
       
                munchler wrote 1 day ago:
                You do realize that there a lot of people who sit at a desk and
                use a computer all day, right? Those are the ones whose jobs
                are vulnerable, not the ones who work with their hands or
                interact with the public.
       
          chromacity wrote 1 day ago:
          > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want
          to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
          
          It's not an exaggeration to say that this is how millions of people
          use Facebook. It might be not how most HNers use it, but create a new
          account and you will be absolutely funneled toward prolific producers
          of video-based AI slop.
          
          But the problem is that FB and Tiktok (and to a smaller extent, YT
          Shorts) have cornered the AI video doom scroll market, and no one
          really seemed to be inclined to use Sora and related models for
          anything more creative. Which probably made it not worth subsidizing.
       
          echelon wrote 1 day ago:
          > The thing that didn't make sense with this app: who would ever want
          to scroll only AI generated videos over a combined feed?
          
          It was legitimately fun until the IP guardrails came up and we
          couldn't do anything with the characters and culture we know.
          
          If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of the
          videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.
       
            praisewhitey wrote 1 day ago:
            >If you look at US top videos on YouTube any given day, 40-60% of
            the videos are IP-based. Star Wars, Nintendo, Marvel, music, etc.
            
            Where can I get this data?
       
              GorbachevyChase wrote 1 day ago:
              A theme I have noticed in content oriented towards young children
              is a very heavy use of probably unlicensed depictions of famous
              characters from popular franchises. Is Nintendo collecting a
              royalty from “it’s raining tacos“? Probably not.
       
              ipaddr wrote 1 day ago:
              Top videos are Mr Beast and other youtube personalities.
       
                jinushaun wrote 1 day ago:
                Only because they promote it. The default experience for a new
                user on Youtube is to show you content from creators with 5M+
                subscribers. It’s a positive feedback loop.
                
                I find all of it lame and cringe, so I downvote all of that.
                However stuff still sneaks by…
       
              echelon wrote 1 day ago:
              Hm, turns out they removed these last year: [1] Bummer. It used
              to be at: [2] So last year, these were the top videos: [3]
              There's this, but it's nowhere near as good as seeing the actual
              videos:
              
 (HTM)        [1]: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-trending-p...
 (HTM)        [2]: https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
 (HTM)        [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250324155132/https://www.y...
 (HTM)        [4]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube
       
            tantalor wrote 1 day ago:
            > look at US top videos on YouTube any given day
            
            I'd rather eat poison
       
              toss1 wrote 1 day ago:
              Indeed!!
              
              If you consider how the reading, audio, and video you consume
              either builds or degrades your capabilities and character, as the
              food or poison you consume either builds or degrades your
              physical health, then [looking at US top videos on YouTube any
              given day] literally IS taking poison for your mind.
              
              Depending on the poison and the dosage, eating the poison for
              your body instead may be the lesser of the two evils.
       
                toss1 wrote 1 day ago:
                Weird. No activity or response to an obscure post beyond a
                couple upvotes.  Then, the next day a brigade no-engagement
                downvotes. IDC, but seems like some corporate image management
                trying to hide negative takes on Google properties?  Sheesh
       
              echelon wrote 1 day ago:
              We can have that discussion, or we can have the more interesting
              discussion of just how much big corporate intellectual property,
              franchises, and brands have their hooks in pop culture.
              
              Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
              
              It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of the
              pyramid can effectively create new brands and IPs at a fast
              enough rate to displace the lack of being able to use corporate
              IP.
              
              I also think the lawyers at the MPAA, RIAA, gaming industry, etc.
              will ultimately require all of social media to install VLMs to
              detect if their properties are being posted. Forget generation -
              that's hard to squash - they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok,
              YouTube, and Reddit and force them to obtain licenses to their
              characters and music. We'll see cable TV era "blackouts" when a
              social network has to renegotiate their IP license.
              
              People really wanted to use Sora for about a week. After the
              app/model debuted, they lost the ability to generate IP within
              the first week. The interest faded almost immediately. The same
              thing happened with Seedance 2.0.
              
              People want to generate IP.
              
              edit: clarity
       
                KaiserPro wrote 1 day ago:
                > Big IP is strong arming OpenAI, Suno, and all the rest.
                
                > It'll be interesting to see whether creators at the bottom of
                the pyramid can effectively create new brands
                
                The problem is, to create a brand, you need to be able to
                protect it against rivals either ripping you off, or diluting
                it.
                
                The same mechanism that protects "big" IP is also protect
                everyone else, even the small people.
                
                > they'll go directly to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit
                and force them to obtain licenses
                
                They already do that for music. But the issue is this, if we
                want culture, we need to find a way to pay for it. Is it
                possible for a bunch of mates to make enough money to live on
                playing in a local band? not really. They can only really make
                money if they either have a viable local gigging scene, or
                large enough online following to sell merch/patreon.
                
                The big IP merchants were quite keen for videogen, because they
                sense that its possible to cut out the expensive artists. If
                they can not pay actors, writers, artists, then its way more
                profitable for them. This is part of the reason why AI hasn't
                been hit with the napster ban hammer.
                
                I think the other thing to remember is that creating good IP is
                hard, and you can't really just pull it out of your arse after
                5 minutes. The original seed takes a long time to refine, test,
                evolve. Even the half arsed sequels require work.
       
                pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
                Maybe, but the Sora shutdown comes immediately after reaching a
                deal with Disney to use their IP. Which might have solved that
                problem.
       
                no_wizard wrote 1 day ago:
                Personally I’m glad that big IP came in and smashed the AI
                companies like this. They been relentlessly ripping off smaller
                creators for some time now.
                
                It opens the precedent for those creators to now also hold
                these companies responsible. That’s not a bad thing under the
                current legal system in this way.
                
                Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI
                assistance is much more interesting to me
       
                  oorza wrote 1 day ago:
                  > Also, seeing genuine original creations created with AI
                  assistance is much more interesting to me
                  
                  The great disappointment about how all of this is marketed is
                  what AI should be good at doing - enhancing a tiny budget -
                  is all but forgotten.  I don't want a video of Pikachu
                  fighting Doctor Strange, I want some weirdos fantastical
                  horror movie that he could never get financed, but was able
                  to green screen and use AI to generate everything.  I don't
                  want a goofy top 40 country song full of silly lyrics, I want
                  musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part of
                  composition.
                  
                  In the same way that there's a difference between vibe coding
                  and using a coding assistant...
       
                    NateEag wrote 1 day ago:
                    > I want musicians to use AI to generate new sounds as part
                    of composition.
                    
                    As a onetime semi-pro musician, with decades of live
                    performance and sound design experience:
                    
                    I would rather burn my beloved instruments publicly and pee
                    on the fire.
       
                      phatfish wrote 1 day ago:
                      It depends how it is used. If it is an assist which
                      generates sounds/samples that a musician can edit
                      themselves, that seems fine. But spewing out a final form
                      track from a prompt would just be slop.
                      
                      Integrating AI with existing tools to improve
                      productivity is harder and requires effort and
                      investment...
       
                        NateEag wrote 1 day ago:
                        As one whose musicianship involved a great deal of
                        generating sounds and samples myself, via modular
                        synthesis and the occasional use of a programming
                        language for DSP, I assure you I find that idea of
                        using genAI for an assist on that front offensive.
                        
                        Could you use the bullshit machines to generate sounds
                        that were nuanced, musical, and original, with enough
                        time and effort?
                        
                        Maybe. I'm not sure original is something they can do,
                        but it's not totally implausible.
                        
                        I would strongly recommend learning to use other tools
                        for that purpose, instead of feeding the plagiarism
                        monstrosities.
       
                          echelon wrote 1 day ago:
                          The aversion people like you have for AI is
                          uncomfortable to me.
                          
                          I understand your entire world model is shaped by
                          your past and that this machine is changing the
                          fundamentals.
                          
                          As an outsider to music, I'm excited that I have
                          access to something I previously did not through the
                          use of Suno and other tools. I'm excited that I can
                          come in and just try things and not hit a skill wall
                          or quality barrier that would cause me to quit with
                          the limited time and effort a working adult has. It's
                          something I've wanted to do for a long time, but just
                          never had the time for.
                          
                          Attempting to learn costs thousands of hours before
                          you can even start to feel good about it, and I don't
                          have that time. Life is short and I'm already
                          thinking about the end.
                          
                          I used to be sympathetic to folks with your view, but
                          now that programming and engineering are impacted by
                          this - I'm in the crosshairs too. I'm subject to the
                          same forces.
                          
                          I've decided I love this tech even more. Claude Code
                          is a tool, just like all of these other tools.
                          
                          This rising tide of capabilities is so awesome. This
                          is the space age stuff I dreamed about as a kid, and
                          it's real and tangible.
                          
                          So no, I won't restrict myself to your set of
                          pre-approved tools. I'm going to have fun and learn
                          my way.
                          
                          And it is fun.
                          
                          You can keep having fun the way you like to. What
                          other people do shouldn't be ruining the fun you
                          have, and if it is, then you should reevaluate why
                          you do it.
       
                      rustystump wrote 1 day ago:
                      I think he meant more like a synth. You could take
                      recordings and process them using ai. At least this was
                      my takeaway
       
                        NateEag wrote 1 day ago:
                        I spent years deep in modular synthesis, making my own
                        patches, sounds, and effects processors then using them
                        to perform music.
                        
                        Taking away the precision, control, and serendipity
                        afforded by modules and cables, or a programming
                        language, and telling me "Just describe what you want
                        and the plagiarism machine will spit out whatever
                        correlates with that description on average" would
                        destroy everything I love about synthesis.
       
                          rustystump wrote 1 day ago:
                          U are arguing against a person who isnt there. I also
                          have done similar and my mind was not thinking
                          specifically prompt the whole output. I think people
                          have this kneejerk to anything that isnt total
                          negativity of ai in the creative space. It is only a
                          tool.
       
                            NateEag wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
                            The nuclear bomb is only a tool.
                            
                            Ditto nerve gas, and the rack.
                            
                            Tools absolutely _can_ have moral valence.
                            
                            Beyond that, they can also be more or less
                            effective for a variety of purposes.
                            
                            I spent decades to achieve solid competence at a
                            few different skills, and my experience of genAI
                            thus far is that it can easily give the user the
                            delusion of mastery, ensuring the user does not
                            develop true skills, trapped in the false belief
                            that they can do everything they want to or ever
                            would want to.
                            
                            The process of struggling to learn new skills
                            showed me new worlds of  possibility I would never
                            have discovered or explored without first
                            developing those skills.
                            
                            There are very legitimate reasons why so many
                            artists and musicians hate genAI.
       
                array_key_first wrote 1 day ago:
                Pop culture is a fickle beast. What is pop culture is community
                made, not corporate made, and it can't be bought and sold like
                traditional markets. It's one of the few areas of life where
                nobodies can become somebody, and corporations hate this.
                
                Media like YouTube isn't consolidating because that's what
                people want, it's because that's what YouTube and IP holders
                want. They want death to people like Boxxy, and they want you
                to watch VEVO instead.
       
                jrflowers wrote 1 day ago:
                > People wanted to use Sora for about a week. Then they lost
                the ability to generate IP.
                
                Or the novelty wore off in about a week, and then after that it
                also became harder to generate videos of baby yoda at Westboro
                Baptist Church protests
       
        PLenz wrote 1 day ago:
        This was bound to happen. IP is data and data is moat.
       
          yabutlivnWoods wrote 1 day ago:
          No. Money is moat. Not enough of it is what keeps the average person
          on the treadmill rather than drawing their own cartoons.
          
          Hustle just to barely stay afloat water or drown, means no time to
          compete with our own output.
          
          America is a financially engineered joke regurgitating its own recent
          history, collapsing like an LLM trained on its own output. The rich
          are not even pretending it's "a free country" as they have enough
          wealth for how many years left most of them have to live, and have
          seen the apathy to their own plight keeping the average person in
          theit lane they don't fear the public.
          
          It’ll all collapse as they generationally churn out of life and the
          Millennials on down with zero skills but "data entry into a computer"
          will be holding an empty bag, taking orders from
          foreign nations that bought up all the American businesses we built.
       
        latchkey wrote 1 day ago:
        What happens to all the compute that was allocated to run that service?
        They would have signed multi-year contracts.
       
          ZiiS wrote 1 day ago:
          They get to use if for services with better returns.
       
        cdrnsf wrote 1 day ago:
        I never understood the appeal or business promise of video slop, with
        or without Disney's blessing.
       
          dawnerd wrote 1 day ago:
          The only people I've seen post AI Disney content was in the Facebook
          groups for the parks / cruises. Before that it was whatever clipart
          they could find. There's just no market for it. No one is going to
          pay to make fake disney art.
       
            AkelaA wrote 1 day ago:
            AI art as a whole has just become the new clipart. The fact that
            it’s effortless to produce just means that it has no real
            artistic value, and by using it all you’re signifying to people
            is that you’re too cheap to pay someone to create real art.
            
            It’s quickly become the modern day equivalent of Comic Sans,
            WordArt, and the default clipart illustrations included in Word
            ‘98.
       
              k3k3 wrote 1 day ago:
              I dunno about you... but it boggles my mind how many others can't
              see it.
              
              Perhaps most people are absolutely devoid of any taste of what
              makes art? I dont know.
       
                vortegne wrote 1 day ago:
                Techbros, largely, never had any taste to begin with. They just
                also don't have the skills/will to make any art, so they could
                hide their lack of taste for a long time.
                
                That said, there are still people with exceptional aesthetic
                sensibilities in the tech field, obviously. They're just
                largely not in this space.
       
        pm90 wrote 1 day ago:
        It feels like the bubble is starting to pop. A crisis of confidence is
        not something OAI can afford at this stage...
       
          ahartman00 wrote 1 day ago:
          Well there was the incident at Amazon[1]: "Amazon just did something
          unprecedented: they're forcing a 90-day safety reset across 335
          critical systems after their AI coding tool caused catastrophic
          outages. The March 5th incident alone lost 6.3 million orders and
          triggered 21,716 peak Downdetector reports"
          
          And two at Meta[2]: "A rogue AI agent at Meta took action without
          approval and exposed sensitive company and user data to employees who
          were not authorized to access it"
          
          "director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs, described a
          different but related failure in a viral post on X last month. She
          asked an OpenClaw agent to review her email inbox with clear
          instructions to confirm before acting. The agent began deleting
          emails on its own."
          
          Even Elon Musk has shared the wisdom to proceed with caution! [3] 1.
          [1] 2. [2] 3.
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://dev.to/tyson_cung/amazon-lost-63m-orders-after-ai-co...
 (HTM)    [2]: https://venturebeat.com/security/meta-rogue-ai-agent-confuse...
 (HTM)    [3]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2031352859846148366
       
          small_model wrote 1 day ago:
          I wonder if Anthropic has overtaken them in revenue, seems like more
          people would pay for Claude code than to chat with ChatGTP. Would be
          good to see Codex vs Claude Code income.
       
          ignoramous wrote 1 day ago:
          > feels like the bubble is starting to pop
          
          May be. OpenAI shuttering Sora is line with them shifting focus
          towards b2b sales, instead of b2b2c or b2c.
          
          Interestingly, Aditya Ramesh, who iirc was the Sora 1 lead, is now
          "VP of Robotics" at OpenAI per his Twitter bio:
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://x.com/model_mechanic
       
          ps06756 wrote 1 day ago:
          It's not because of the bubble. There is literally no advantage to
          generating slop videos. It looks cool for a while but no audience is
          going to consume such videos.
          
          Any platform which focusses on AI generated videos is doomed.
       
            Morromist wrote 1 day ago:
            My girlfriend keeps sending me AI generated tiktoks, despite me
            complaining about them. To be fair, I've seen literally nothing on
            tiktok that isn't garbage, so the competition is pretty low. Your
            point "It looks cool for a while" might have some merit - I think
            I've seen less and less interest in these things over the last year
            which fits the news articles I've seen mentioning people got bored
            of using Sora pretty quickly.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-sora-app-struggling-...
       
              ps06756 wrote 1 day ago:
              I didn't compare it with tiktok, because on tiktok majority of
              the content is slop even if it is human generated, so the bar is
              pretty low.
       
                Morromist wrote 1 day ago:
                That is accurate.
       
            msy wrote 1 day ago:
            Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people
            endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and
            expectations of the market are so low you can't really
            differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.
       
            TaupeRanger wrote 1 day ago:
            Sounds like a well disguised cope on your part. There absolutely is
            an audience (see reels, TikTok, etc.) and the tech will only get
            better from here.
       
              emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
              You sound desperate to believe this. I think you could use a
              little more emotional distance here.
       
            emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
            So much for “replacing VFX artists”. It’s not necessarily a
            harbinger of doom for the AI industry, but this indicates that the
            most fervent AI boosters were dead wrong.
       
              zer00eyz wrote 1 day ago:
              > but this indicates that the most fervent AI boosters were dead
              wrong.
              
              I dont do design, or make videos, or ask ai for legal advice, or
              medical advice cause I lack the skill and understanding of these
              fields. Dunning Kruger still applies...
              
              There is interesting "AI" content out there, clearly the
              person(s) behind it put some thought into it and had a vision.
       
                ps06756 wrote 1 day ago:
                True, I did try to make some useful 1 minute videos, and found
                it really difficult to arrive at a finished product
                
                Sure, I can write the screenplay and Veo will generate it for
                me. But I don't have experience in video creation/production ,
                so it is difficult for me to write good prompts which generate
                engaging video
       
              zarzavat wrote 1 day ago:
              It's more like the VFX market is too small for OpenAI to bother
              killing. They are only interested in business models that can
              justify a trillion dollar valuation.
       
            Ancalagon wrote 1 day ago:
            > no audience is going to consume such videos
            
            sir, have you seen tiktok?
       
              ps06756 wrote 1 day ago:
              I meant the longer video format, not tiktok. Tiktok is full of
              slop, both AI and human generated
       
          EA-3167 wrote 1 day ago:
          Nothing like an ill-considered war with global economic consequences
          to bring reality crashing back down on Silicon Valley; sometimes life
          throws a big old margin call your way and things break down.
       
        poemxo wrote 1 day ago:
        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 wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
        singingwolfboy wrote 1 day ago:
        
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://archive.ph/ABkeI
       
        harlequinetcie wrote 1 day ago:
        Are we sure it was in that order?
       
        mikhmha wrote 1 day ago:
        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..
       
        _doctor_love wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
          lossyalgo wrote 1 day ago:
          Is OpenAI still considered a startup? They were founded ~10 years ago
          in December 2015.
       
          msabalau wrote 1 day ago:
          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 wrote 1 day ago:
            > 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.
       
          ronsor wrote 1 day ago:
          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 wrote 1 day ago:
            Yes, sadly, the West is not the leader. The work done by the
            Chinese labs is just so damn good.
       
        Sir_Twist wrote 1 day ago:
        > 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?
       
          bredren wrote 1 day ago:
          There were ~trends similar to what appeared early in TikTok.
          
          For example, early TikTok had the Boss Walk.
          
          Sora had no big content trends split into many micro trends in some
          established ~universe.
       
            NewLogic wrote 1 day ago:
            An AI video trend on Instagram as been Han from Tokyo Drift with
            different cars. People still want to share those on the platforms
            they are already locked into with their friends.
       
              sureglymop wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
              It kind of seems obvious that people would rather share their
              content on the pre-established platforms.
              
              I believe OpenAI didn't actually want to create an alternative
              platform. Instead, they wanted (and needed) to be in control.
              This is really due to the experimental nature of the technology
              and platform. They wanted to do market research yet retain the
              power to pull it at any time.
              
              Arguably they were successful in that given that they now have
              the ability to stop it.
       
            jazzyjackson wrote 1 day ago:
            Well, that stuff goes viral because it’s fun to imitate, all the
            dances and challenges provided a flywheel to get people creating
            more content, it’s fun to make the video.
            
            If I see an AI video and my options to participate are… prompt
            another AI video? What’s the point
       
              bredren wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
              I think you’d have to participate, but this was a real thing
              and it was fun.
              
              For example, there is one that was a making sort of Macy’s
              thanksgiving day-style parade floats.
              
              And you could pick virtually any content type and see this
              interpreted as “real” floats.
              
              It did not require a ton of effort, for example you could reply
              to the above example existing with the prompt  “do this, but
              have the float theme be ‘meet the feebles’”
              
              And if you know of that film and recognized the AI’s
              interpretation of it in that context and it was half decent it
              was entertaining.
              
              Not all “trends” if you can call them that were so simple to
              do well with.
              
              Often the prompts needed to be elaborate and required multiple
              generations to really get a feel for if you were on the right
              track.
              
              I think they did have something here and probably someone will do
              it again and it will work.
       
              pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
              You're supposed to press the button to receive dopamine. It's all
              just narrower and narrower Skinner boxes.
       
          mjr00 wrote 1 day ago:
          >  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] [1] - only one mention of "AI slop" in the entire thread, though
          partial credit goes to "movieslop".
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39386156
       
            lossyalgo wrote 1 day ago:
            To nitpick a tiny bit, from Wikipedia[0]:
            
            > 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]
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)
       
        softwaredoug wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        password54321 wrote 1 day ago:
        "OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy
        shift to refocus the company around coding and business users" - WSJ
        
        Coding is where the money is.
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46432791#46434072
       
          flashman wrote 1 day ago:
          Not enough money though. Not hundreds of billions of dollars.
       
          34ahgaf wrote 1 day ago:
          It is the last narrative that some of Wall Street believes and has
          enough mediocre or senile coders to promote it.
          
          That narrative will implode like Sora later this year.
       
            bpodgursky wrote 1 day ago:
            It's because programmers are willing to pay thousands of dollars a
            month for a product commensurate with the value to provides, aka AI
            coding.
            
            Generating pointless AI videos for pocket change or ad revenue is a
            loser in comparison.
       
              drzaiusx11 wrote 1 day ago:
              From my vantage point AI consumption is being lead by tech
              leadership moreso than actual in-the-weeds programmers
              themselves. HN just happens to include more folk at the
              intersection of leadership and individual code contributor.
              
              The top down push for AI is in line with the age old traditions
              of replacing highly skilled and highly compensated trade workers
              with automation. The writing is on the wall if folks care to
              look; many just don't want to. This has happened 1000 times
              before and it'll keep happening in the name of "progress" in
              capitalist systems for as long as there are "inefficiencies" to
              "resolve." AI is meant as our replacement, not as an extension of
              our skill as it happens to align with today.
              
              Its increasingly obvious that the next phase in the evolution of
              the average programmer role will be as technical requirements
              writers and machine generated output validators, leaving the
              actual implementation outsourced to the machine. Even in that new
              role, there is no secret sauce protecting this "programmer" from
              further automation. Technical product managers eventually fall to
              automation given enough time and money poured into the automation
              of translating fuzzy, under specified ideas into concrete
              bulleted requirements where they can simply review the listed
              output, make minor tweaks and hit "send" to generate the list of
              jira-like units of work to farm out to a fleet of agents wearing
              various hats (architect, programming, validator, etc.)
              
              The above is very much in progress already, and today I'm already
              spending the majority of my time reviewing the output of said AI
              "teams", and let me tell you: it gets closer and closer to "good
              enough" week by week. Last year's models are horse shit in
              comparison to what I'm using today with agentic teams of the
              latest frontier models (Opus 4.6 [1m] currently, with some
              Sonnet.)
              
              Maybe we're at a plateau and the limitations inherent in GenAI
              tech will be insurmountable before we get to 100% replacement.
              But it literally won't matter in the end as "good enough" always
              prevails over the perfect, and human devs are far from perfect
              already.
              
              I have been producing software (at fang scale) for several
              decades now, and I've been closely monitoring GenAI systems for
              coding specifically.  Even just a few months ago I'd get a
              verbose, meandering sprawl of methods and logic scattered with
              the actual deliverables outlined in the prompt from these
              systems. Sometimes even with clear disregard of the requirements
              laid out, or "cheating" on validation via disabling tests or
              writing ones that don't actually do anything useful. Today I'm
              getting none of that. I don't know what changed, but I somehow
              get automated code with good separation of concerns, following
              best practices and proven architectural patterns. Sure, with a
              bunch of juniors let loose with AI you get garbage still, but
              that's simply a function of poor delegation of work units. Giving
              the individual developer and the AI too much leeway in the scope
              of changes is the bug there. Division of work into small enough
              units is the key and always has been for the de-skilling portion
              of automating away skilled human labor for machines. We're just
              watching Marxist theory on capitalist systems play out in real
              time in a field generally thought to be "safe." It certainly
              won't be the last.
       
                muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
                Whats your setup for the agent team?
       
                  drzaiusx11 wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
                  Pretty bare bones setup: Claude Agent Teams with some
                  wrappers to leverage our bedrock hosted models. Opus 4.6 [1m]
                  as orchestrator, architect and reviewer, Sonnet 4.6 [1m] for
                  investigation, data gathering and coding depending on task
                  scope.
       
              embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
              Thousands? Maybe not, but hundreds? Yeah, for my
              freelancer/contracting gigs, it's easily worth $200/month to be
              able to say "How come X is like that and what change lead to Y
              being Z?", wait 20 minutes and then get an answer that jumpstarts
              understanding a completely new codebase. If AI/LLMs never evolved
              beyond their current skills and usefulness, I'd still be happy to
              pay $200/month for this.
              
              However, I don't know a single developer who pays "thousands of
              dollars a month", not sure how you'd end up like that.
       
              bogzz wrote 1 day ago:
              I most definitely am not.
       
            skwirl wrote 1 day ago:
            It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in
            2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.
       
              wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
              I liken it to VR. That was a big hype before AI and while I
              really love the tech (I have 5 headsets) I could have told anyone
              that the expectations were insane. The investors truly believed
              that in 2-3 years time everyone would be doing everything with a
              big headset on. It was dragged into lots of situations where it
              didn't belong.
              
              Then of course the hype collapsed and now even the usecases where
              VR shines are deemed a flop. But no, it's exceptionally good at
              simulation (racing/flight) and visualising complex designs while
              3D designing.
              
              I see the same with generative AI and LLM. It's really good with
              programming. It's definitely good at making quick art drafts or
              even final ones for those who don't care too much about the
              specifics of the output. I use it a lot for inspiration.
              
              But it's not good for everything that it's trying to be sold as.
              Just like the VR craze they're dragging it by the hairs into
              usecases where it has no business being. A lot of these products
              are begging to die.
              
              For example an automation tool using real world language. For
              that it's a disaster, it's inconsistent and constantly confuses
              itself. It's the reason openclaw is a foot bazooka. It's also not
              very great at meeting summaries especially those where many
              speakers are in a room on the same microphone.
              
              I don't think AI will disappear but a realignment to the usecases
              where it actually adds value, yes I hope that happens soon.
       
                Marazan wrote 1 day ago:
                > It's also not very great at meeting summaries especially
                those where many speakers are in a room on the same microphone.
                
                It is astonishingly poor at this.  My intuition was that it
                should be good at this (it is basically a translation problem
                right?    And LLMs are fundamentally translation systems) but the
                practical results are so poor.    Not just mis-identifying
                speakers (frequently saying PersonX responded to PersonX) but
                managing complete opposite conclusions from what was actually
                said.
                
                I'm genuinely intrigued as to what approaches have been taken
                in this space and what the "hard problem" is that is stopping
                it being good.
       
                utopiah wrote 1 day ago:
                Ugh... a balanced take, this isn't appropriate for social
                media! /s
       
            afavour wrote 1 day ago:
            No, AI is truly useful in software engineering. I was a skeptic
            until I started using it. No, it isn’t going to solve every
            problem out there, but it’s a force multiplier.
       
              rf15 wrote 1 day ago:
              You pay understanding for speed. How much this trade is
              acceptable is up to you and the task you have in front of you. I
              cannot recommend it as a general solution.
       
                afavour wrote 1 day ago:
                You might say the same about garbage collected programming
                languages. It’s an acceptable tradeoff in a lot of scenarios.
                Same goes for AI.
       
                wiseowise wrote 1 day ago:
                That’s just falls. I’ve spent disproportionate amount on
                “understanding” awful tooling like Gradle and npm.
                There’s no value in it if you’re not an infra engineer. It
                would take me a couple of days to manually restructure my hobby
                app, now I can just say “extract this into another
                workspace/subproject” and be done with it in minutes. And
                that’s just one example.
       
                  rf15 wrote 1 day ago:
                  I agree with this sentiment. I just also see AI-driven
                  development in core business logic, where truly understanding
                  what is going on is essential and yet completely disregarded.
       
                  phist_mcgee wrote 1 day ago:
                  If I never have to debug a gradle file ever again, it's all
                  worth it.
       
                elktown wrote 1 day ago:
                This field doesn’t do well on long-term thinking. Even if all
                this turns out to be a net loss, it will be reinterpreted as a
                win and just an opportunity for even more of the same solution.
                There are numerous examples of this, e.g. the OOP craze. Tech
                is a stock market of ideas and HN is a trading floor. The
                “line goes up” logic applies - not merit.
       
                  pjc50 wrote 1 day ago:
                  Describing OOP as a "craze" is incredibly out of touch. It's
                  been a thing for, what, three decades?
       
                    foobiekr wrote 1 day ago:
                    You may not recall the crazy era of OOP where people would
                    go bonkers with massive object trees trying to objectify
                    everything and using operator overloading to do (dumb)
                    things like adding a control to a window with +=.
       
                    Peritract wrote 1 day ago:
                    OOP is great. "OOP is the one perfect paradigm for all
                    coding" was the craze.
       
                    the-smug-one wrote 1 day ago:
                    There certainly was an OOP craze, that's not out of touch
                    to talk about.
       
                      Marazan wrote 1 day ago:
                      AbstractBeanFactoryFactoryInterfaceBeanContextFactoryBean
                      Bean.java
       
                    elktown wrote 1 day ago:
                    I'm sure I'm not the first person you've seen hinting at
                    OOP (and all that came with it) having been hyped up beyond
                    its merits.
       
            SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
            To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding and they very well could
            displace some jobs. But you'll always need people at the helm who
            know what they're doing too.
       
              muskstinks wrote 1 day ago:
              Yeah they are called PMs and already exist. And these people
              normally are creating the design documents, the flows etc. and
              then have to wait for the dev team to implement this.
              
              So a good PM running 1-3 teams, will only need 1-3 agentic ai
              teams instead.
       
              bigstrat2003 wrote 1 day ago:
              > To be fair, LLMs are exceptional at coding
              
              No they aren't. Any decently skilled human blows them out of the
              water. They can do better than an untrained human, but that's not
              much of an achievement.
       
                drzaiusx11 wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
                With the models I've been working with lately, providing them
                with small, actionable units of work that can easily fit within
                their context window (before compaction) seems to work well. If
                you can hit that sweet spot, you can get excellent output.
                
                I don't tell the agents to "just go do it", as that tends to go
                off the rails for complex tasks. Emulating real world software
                development processes in meat space with your AI "team" seems
                to approximate similar outcomes.
                
                I usually start by having the agents construct a plan document
                which I iterate on and build up well before writing code. This
                is a living document, not a final design (yet.) If I run into
                context window issues I just shut them down and rebuild from
                the document.  I farm out research and data gathering tasks to
                build it up. Once all the findings are in I have the architect
                take a stab at the technical system design before the break
                down and delegation work begins. By then the units of work are
                small and manageable.
       
                Syntaf wrote 1 day ago:
                I’ve been a full stack developer for 10+ years now and I
                completely disagree.
                
                Modern models like Opus / Gemini 3 are great coding companions;
                they are perfectly capable of building clean code given the
                right context and prompt.
                
                At the end of the day it’s the same rule of garbage in ->
                garbage out, if you don’t have the right context / skills /
                guidance you can easily end up with bad code as you could with
                good code.
       
                dbbk wrote 1 day ago:
                I have 20 years of experience and I don't handwrite any code
                anymore. Opus does everything, and it only needs a bit of
                steering occasionally. If you can give it guardrails (ie a
                pre-existing design system) and ways to verify its output (ie
                enforce TDD and use Chrome to visually verify) then it gets it
                right basically every time.
       
                phist_mcgee wrote 1 day ago:
                Am I an untrained human if I believe that Claude Opus 4.6
                produces generally better code than I do in most circumstances?
                
                Even with years as a principal engineer at a company with high
                coding standards and engineering processes?
       
                  rubzah wrote 1 day ago:
                  Maybe not untrained, but you work on some easy, boring shit.
                  That may be true for a lot of developers, I don't know.
       
                    phist_mcgee wrote 1 day ago:
                    What do you reckon? Do you think that is true for me and
                    thousands of others, or that your opinion on this is too
                    narrow and rigid?
       
                wiseowise wrote 1 day ago:
                > Any decently skilled human blows them out of the water
                
                No, by far no. I’m by all accounts “decently skilled
                human”, at least if we go by our org, and it blows anyone out
                of the water with some slight guidance.
                
                And the most important part: it doesn’t get tired, it
                doesn’t have any mood swings, its performance isn’t
                affected by poor sleep, party yesterday or their SO having a
                bad day.
       
                MrScruff wrote 1 day ago:
                Turns out there are whole categories of software where
                'extremely fast and good enough' is what matters, even for
                skilled software developers.
       
                volkercraig wrote 1 day ago:
                The thing is, LLM's produce better quality one-shots than any
                of the products that get returned from overseas ultra-budget
                contractors in India or SEA. I don't know what that means for
                Western devs, but I can tell you that the fortune 500 I work
                for is dialing back on contracting and outsourcing because
                domestic teams can do higher-quality work faster.
       
                  liquid_thyme wrote 1 day ago:
                  >The thing is, LLM's produce better quality one-shots than
                  any of the products that get returned from overseas
                  ultra-budget contractors in India or SEA.
                  
                  Source?
       
              drdeafenshmirtz wrote 1 day ago:
              Also that developers make for good early adopters for tech
       
                SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
                This is very true and an underrated comment.
       
          paxys wrote 1 day ago:
          How are they going to claw back the market from Anthropic though?
       
            drdeafenshmirtz wrote 1 day ago:
            "Clawing back" was what the Open Claw acquisition was for ;)
       
            janalsncm wrote 1 day ago:
            Step 1: make a coding product which is better on
            cost/quality/speed. Probably need to choose two, so redirecting
            compute from dumb ai videos to coding makes sense.
            
            Step 2: win back public trust by firing Sam Altman or dropping
            defense contracts or something else I can’t think of.
       
              yoyohello13 wrote 1 day ago:
              Step 3: use politicians to jam Anthropic up in legal battles.
       
                SecretDreams wrote 1 day ago:
                This is actually step 1
       
            lossyalgo wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
              GenerWork wrote 1 day ago:
              I believe that the $1b is apparently not coming anymore because
              it was basically dependent upon Sora being an actual product that
              actual people can use, which isn't the case anymore.
       
          MyFirstSass wrote 1 day ago:
          [flagged]
       
            bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
              sensanaty wrote 1 day ago:
              Have they? I keep seeing this little snippet of wisdom being
              thrown about everywhere in these AI discussions as a gotcha, but
              to me it seems like moving jobs into dirt cheap 3rd world
              countries with slave labor is the biggest culprit for job loss
              than any kind of automation from software.
              
              If anything software engineers have spawned in uncountable
              numbers of jobs that never would've existed before, is what my
              intuition tells me.
       
              skydhash wrote 1 day ago:
              Haven't mechanical engineers done the same thing (steam engines,
              trains,...)? The whole applied science is about using knowledge
              to remove tediousness (and now adding it back). A lot of jobs
              have been removed.
       
                bibimsz wrote 1 day ago:
                model T factor workers are anti worker
       
              al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
              I want to make people’s jobs easier and more interesting, I
              never want to make them redundant.
              
              This did happen once. 3 people were laid off, I think directly
              based on things I said to drive the completion of some
              automation. That was the last time I ever measured something in
              man-hours to make a point. I’ll never do it again. That was
              over 12 years ago.
       
        ChrisArchitect wrote 1 day ago:
        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
        
        ( [1] )
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://x.com/soraofficialapp/status/2036546752535470382
       
        timpera wrote 1 day ago:
        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.
       
        Imnimo wrote 2 days ago:
        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 wrote 1 day ago:
          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.
       
            QuantumNomad_ wrote 1 day ago:
            I generated a fair number of videos with Sora, and used a handful
            of those and edited them outside of Sora for a couple of short
            TikTok videos.
            
            Never once did I bother to browse videos made by others on Sora
            itself. I wonder if anyone did.
       
              johanyc wrote 1 day ago:
              Same.  I pretty much only watch videos I generate.
       
        iainctduncan wrote 2 days ago:
        You know they are burning money dangerously when they decide to focus
        on the area in which they are getting their asses kicked...
       
          tyleo wrote 1 day ago:
          Yeah, I thought it was strange too. I thought OpenAI could
          meaningfully differentiate by being something more like a “Social
          Media AI”.
          
          I feel like they are sailing into a red ocean with what look more
          like copycat tactics than innovation (e.g., Codex v Claude Code;
          Astral v Bun)
       
        arkadiytehgraet wrote 2 days ago:
        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.
       
        helsinkiandrew wrote 2 days ago:
        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.
       
          oro44 wrote 1 day ago:
          Stating the obvious but spraying and praying is not a strategy
       
        noemit wrote 2 days ago:
        I assume it was too expensive, because it's really not a bad tool. I
        used it recently to make my twitter pfp :)
       
        taytus wrote 2 days ago:
        How much money did they burn on this? And for what? Nothing?
       
          digitalsushi wrote 1 day ago:
          They paid for an opportunity. Sometimes paying for a chance nets you
          nothing.
          
          If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for,
          you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.
          
          If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a
          winner, in the same objective sense.
          
          Probably controversial. Eh.
       
        nprz wrote 2 days ago:
        Did they give any reason? Too expensive to keep running? Chinese models
        surpassing Sora's capabilities?
       
        ronsor wrote 2 days ago:
        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 wrote 2 days ago:
          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 wrote 1 day ago:
            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.
       
              nomel wrote 1 day ago:
              > Local-first is definitely the way.
              
              i think it's clear cloud hosted is the actual future, which
              people have predicted for decades. it will never make financial
              sense to duplicate what you can get for cheap, because it's
              oversubscribed, with economies of scale and "if we let this run
              idle it's losing us money" pressure, for hardware found in a
              datacenter.
              
              this has been the case for a long while now, and will
              increasingly be so as data centers buy up all the everything.
       
                ronsor wrote 1 day ago:
                Local-first doesn't exclude cloud hosting; it just means you
                can run it locally.
                
                With open models, you have multiple providers competing on
                inference speed, quality, and price, leading to healthier
                market without lock-in.
       
                  nomel wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
                  local first usually means extreme compromise so it can,
                  practically, be run locally, because the cost of owning high
                  end hardware is prohibitive. there are also companies
                  providing locally deployed closed source models, that meet
                  certain security requirements.
                  
                  "open weights" is the appropriate term.
       
        mcast wrote 2 days ago:
        I guess this is a bullish sign OpenAI has hired a lot of PMs from
        Google!
       
          ignoramous wrote 1 day ago:
          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: [1] Weil's now heading "AI for Science":
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/fidji-simo-openai-product-re...
 (HTM)    [2]: https://www.pymnts.com/personnel/2025/openais-chief-product-...
       
          2001zhaozhao wrote 1 day ago:
          We need a 'killed by OpenAI' site now
       
            al_borland wrote 1 day ago:
            This could be taken two ways.
            
            1. OpenAI killing off their own products aggressively, taking a
            page from Google’s book. (I think the way you meant it)
            
            2. Products/companies that no longer exist because OpenAI, or AI in
            general, made them obsolete. (My first instinct when reading it)
       
              quesera wrote 1 day ago:
              3. A Memorial Wall for those who have mistaken ChatGPT for a
              therapist
       
              blharr wrote 1 day ago:
              >Products/companies that no longer exist because OpenAI, or AI in
              general, made them obsolete
              
              What would you place here anyways? Chegg and Stack Overflow?
       
                al_borland wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
                This was more speaking to the hype of what people say AI is
                going to do, more so than the realities of what it's actually
                done so far.
       
        throw4847285 wrote 2 days ago:
        Didn't they cut a huge deal with Disney just 3 months ago?
        
 (HTM)  [1]: https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
       
          toraway wrote 1 day ago:
          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 [1] 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?
          
 (HTM)    [1]: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/openai-sh...
       
          moralestapia wrote 2 days 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.
       
            karel-3d wrote 1 day ago:
            Jony Ive project was cancelled? I cannot find anythin on that
            
            Just that they took down some "io" mentions because of some
            trademark dispute with a third party "iyo".
       
            skywhopper wrote 1 day ago:
            Turns out just lying about what your tech will do and how much
            people want it doesn’t work forever to raise unlimited money to
            throw in the fire hoping you hit something that actually makes a
            profit.
       
            radicality wrote 1 day ago:
            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 wrote 1 day ago:
              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.
       
                rubzah wrote 1 day ago:
                Back in business school they used to tell the story of how
                makers of razor blades would put a good blade as the first and
                the last blade in the pack. I suspect the LLM services of doing
                something like that.
       
                SpicyLemonZest wrote 1 day ago:
                I haven't had the time to fully hash this take out, but a big
                question in the back of my mind has been - is it possible that
                AI model improvements come partly from finding overhang in
                things that look hard and impressive to humans but are actually
                trivial consequences of the training data? If true, then the
                observable performance of any widely distributed model could
                get worse over time as it "mines out" the work that's easy for
                it to do.
       
            password54321 wrote 1 day ago:
            They are just cancelling side projects because Anthropic is
            dominating in enterprise and side projects (probably) don't make
            profit.
            
 (HTM)      [1]: https://x.com/ShanuMathew93/status/2031074311629353299
       
              sethops1 wrote 1 day ago:
              I would point out Anthropic isn't profitable either (yet), it's
              just that enterprise is where the money is. Now that all the AI
              companies are narrowing in on that market, becoming profitable
              will be even more challenging.
       
              timpera wrote 1 day ago:
              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.
       
        strongpigeon wrote 2 days ago:
        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.
       
       
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