[HN Gopher] Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?
___________________________________________________________________
Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?
Author : warrenm
Score : 141 points
Date : 2025-10-21 16:01 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calnewport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (calnewport.com)
| zerosizedweasle wrote:
| "Whether Sora lasts or not, however, is somewhat beside the
| point. What catches my attention most is that OpenAI released
| this app in the first place.
|
| It wasn't that long ago that Sam Altman was still comparing the
| release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb , and
| many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he
| proclaimed 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated by
| LLM-based tools."
|
| That's the thing, this has all been predicated on the notion that
| AGI is next. That's what the money is chasing, why it's sucked in
| astronomical investments. It's cool, but that's not why Nvidia is
| a multi trillion dollar company. It's that value because it was
| promised to be the brainpower behind AGI.
| cratermoon wrote:
| What was predicted to be next: AGI
|
| What we got next: porn
| droptablemain wrote:
| to be fair we also got Stephen Hawking bungee jumping |
| snowboarding | wrestling | drag racing | ice skating | bull-
| fighting | half-pipe
| c0balt wrote:
| To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was
| already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open
| models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for
| this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned
| models.
|
| I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the
| amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was
| astonishing.
| knicholes wrote:
| Wait, we got porn?
| benbayard wrote:
| Yes, Sam A said that "erotica" was coming to openAI. I
| don't think he's mentioned visual pornography though
| https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-
| ment...
| blibble wrote:
| I can't imagine the republican party is going to be
| particularly happy about AI being used for mass porn
| generation
| neonnoodle wrote:
| prompt records = mass blackmail generation
| quantified wrote:
| Porn has driven everyday tech. Online payment systems,
| broadband adoption.
|
| Porn (visual and written erotic impression) has been a normal
| part of the human experience for thousands of years. Across
| different religions, cultures, technological capabilities.
| We're humans.
|
| There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a
| mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity.
|
| Generate your own porn is definitely a huge market. Sharing
| it with others, and then the follow-on concern of what's in
| that shared content, could lead to problems.
| noir_lord wrote:
| > There will always be a market for it, wherever there is a
| mismatch between desire for and access to sexual activity.
|
| Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships
| _still_ look at porn.
|
| It's just human.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| >Attractive people in sexually fulfilling relationships
| still look at porn.
|
| How do you know those relationships are "sexually
| fulfilling"?
| quantified wrote:
| Works for me. You end up travelling for a week away from
| your partner, they're sick for a while, etc.
| skylurk wrote:
| I, uh, have a friend, who tells me watching porn with
| their partner once in a while, can be pretty hot.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > How do you know those relationships are "sexually
| fulfilling"?
|
| You either believe what people report, the clearly-stated
| position on erotic material of the American Association
| of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (1), or
| you can just imagine in your head what you think other
| people's sex lives are like and just believe whatever you
| come up with.
|
| 1. https://www.aasect.org/our-mission.html
| rchaud wrote:
| This is a meme I see online often (and in the show Silicon
| Valley), but I don't think it holds up in practice.
|
| Re: payment systems, Visa and MC are notoriously unfriendly
| to porn vendors, sending them into the arms of crooked
| payment processors like Wirecard. Paypal grew to prominence
| because it was once the only way to buy and sell on Ebay.
| Crypto went from nerd hobby to speculative asset, shipping
| the "medium of exchange for porn purchases" entirely.
|
| As for broadband adoption, it's as likely to have occurred
| for MP3 piracy and being 200X faster than dialup, as it was
| for porn.
| layer8 wrote:
| At least the valuations make sense now. ;)
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| What signals have you seen that point to investment being
| predicated around AGI? Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also
| be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by
| office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies
| datacenter buildouts. That's a much more "sober" outlook than
| AGI.
|
| In fact a fun thing to think about is what signals we could
| observe in markets that specifically call out AGI as the
| expectation as opposed to simple bullish outlook on inference
| usage.
| port3000 wrote:
| "Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an
| expectation of increased inference usage by office workers
| which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter
| buildouts"
|
| AI is already integrated into every single Google search, as
| well as Slack, Notion, Teams, Microsoft Office, Google Docs,
| Zoom, Google Meet, Figma, Hubspot, Zendesk, Freshdesk,
| Intercom, Basecamp, Evernote, Dropbox, Salesforce, Canva,
| Photoshop, Airtable, Gmail, LinkedIn, Shopify, Asana, Trello,
| Monday.com, ClickUp, Miro, Confluence, Jira, GitHub, Linear,
| Docusign, Workday
|
| .....so where is this 100X increase in inference demand going
| to come from?
|
| Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth:
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-
| see...
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Integrations and inference costs aren't necessarily 1:1.
| Integrations can use more AI, reasoning models can cause
| token explosion, Jevons Paradox can drive more inference
| tokens, big businesses and government agencies (around the
| world, not just the US) can begin using more LLMs. I'm not
| sure integrations are that simple. A lot of integrations
| that I know of are very basic integrations.
|
| > Oh and the ChatGPT consumer app is seeing slowing growth:
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/chatgpts-mobile-app-is-
| see...
|
| While I haven't read the article yet, if this is true then
| yes this could be an indication of consumer app style
| inference (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) waning which will put more
| pressure on industrial/tool inference uses to buoy up
| costs.
| hyperpape wrote:
| My experience suffering with JIRA daily is that the AI is
| useless and fairly easy to ignore. If it were actually
| helpful, I could imagine using it more, and the costs would
| increase proportionately.
| bfLives wrote:
| On the other hand, I've found the integration in
| Confluence quite helpful, particularly for making sense
| of acronyms.
| mola wrote:
| I think the motivation for someone like Altman is not AGI, it's
| power and influence. And when he wields billions he has power,
| it doesn't really matter if there's AGI coming.
| hu3 wrote:
| Yep, he just wants to become too big to fail at this point.
|
| I view OpenAI like a pyramid scheme: taking in increasing
| amounts of money to pursuit ever growing promisses that can
| be dangled like a carrot to the next investor.
|
| If you owe investors $100 million, that's your problem. If
| you owe investors $100 billion, that's their problem.
| tmaly wrote:
| We were promised AGI and all we are getting is Bob Ross
| coloring on the walls of a Target store.
|
| The app is fun to use for about 10 minutes then that is it.
|
| Same goes for Grok imagine. All people want to do is generate
| NSFW content.
|
| What happened to improving the world?
| qwery wrote:
| I apologise for talking past the point you're making, but,
| Bob Ross was a human being, you know, with thoughts and
| stuff. How could any of these AI toys possibly compare?
|
| I would love to have Bob Ross, wielding a crayon, add some
| happy little trees to the walls of a Target.
| standardUser wrote:
| AGI is like L5 automated driving - academic concepts that have
| no bearing on the ability of these technologies to transform
| the economy.
| hollerith wrote:
| And no bearing on the ability of these technologies to
| thoroughly screw us.
| marshfarm wrote:
| Was a mistake from the beginning to use language as the basis for
| tokens and embedded spaces between them to generate semantics. It
| wasn't thought out, it was a snowball trial and error that went
| out of control.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Lol ok. We'll wait for your game changing technology, keep us
| posted.
| kick_in_the_dor wrote:
| OP has a point. Are these type of embeddings the best way to
| model thought?
| brokensegue wrote:
| it's the best way we've found so far?
| mentalgear wrote:
| Certainly not the best, just the most practical /
| commercially sell-able. And once a pattern, like LLM text
| embedding is established as the way to "AGI", it takes
| years for other more realistic approaches to gain funding
| again. Gary Marcus wrote about this extensively how
| legitimate AGI research is actually being put back years
| due to the LLM superficial AGI hype.
| marshfarm wrote:
| I think the best way would have been to assume thought is
| wordless (as the science tells us now), and images and
| probability (as symbols) are still arbitrary. That was
| the threshold to cross. Neither neurosymbolic, nor
| neuromorphic get there. Nor will any "world model"
| achieve anything as models are arbitrary.
|
| Using the cybernetic to information theory to cog science
| to comp sci lineage was an increasingly limited set of
| tools to employ for intelligence.
|
| Cybernetics should have been ported expansively to
| neurosci, then neurobio, then something more expansive
| like eco psychology or coodination dynamics. Instead of
| expanding, comp sci became too reductive.
|
| The idea a reductive system that anyone with a little
| math training could A/B test vast swaths of information
| gleaned from existing forms and unlock highly evolved
| processes like thinking, reasoning, action and define
| this as a path to intelligence is quite strange. It
| defies scientific analysis. Intelligence is incredibly
| dense in biology, a vastly hidden, parallel process in
| which one affinity being removed (like the emotions) and
| the intel vanished into zombiehood.
|
| Had we looked at that evidence, we'd have understood that
| language/tokens/embedded space couldn't possibly be a
| composite for all that parallel.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| No one knows, especially not parent with his one liner
| quip.
| marshfarm wrote:
| Action patterns in syntax? They already exist, the binary
| chose to forgo that level emulation for arbitrary words, in
| arbitrary symbols, predicted, geometrically arranged in space
| as "meaning" as tokens.
|
| I'd suggest comp sci caught the low fruit, whatever comes out
| of thekeyboard as a basis, non too smart.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm more concerned about Sora (and video-generating AI in
| general) being the final pour that cements us into our post-truth
| world.
|
| People will be swayed by AI-generated videos while also being
| convinced real videos are AI.
|
| I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.
| pmontra wrote:
| Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person because
| videos will be devoid of trust.
|
| On the other side we want to believe in something, so we'll
| believe in the video that will suit our beliefs.
|
| It's an interesting struggle.
| bilekas wrote:
| Yeah I'm just as annoyed with the AI slop that's coming out
| as anyone, but the next generation of voters won't believe a
| thing and so they will be pushed towards believing what they
| see in real life like campaigners who go door to door etc. It
| could be a great thing and would give meaning to he electoral
| system again ironically!
| kulahan wrote:
| Honestly I can't see a solution beyond concentrating power
| to highly localized regions. Lots more mayors, city
| councils, etc. so there is a real chance you can meet
| someone who represents you.
|
| I don't fully believe _anything_ I see on the internet that
| isn 't backed up by at _least_ two independent sources.
| Even then, I 've probably been tricked at least once.
| bilekas wrote:
| It may come to that, where the federal power is less
| influential and there to mainly manage overall services
| of the nation etc, and then the local states let's say
| manage themselves, if I'm not wrong that was kind of the
| original idea of the great experiment. It doesn't sound
| inherently wrong untill you add tribalism into the mix
| where people are not working with eachother, but that
| seems to be the major push these days, at least that's
| the sentiment I get.
|
| Would that change, maybe not, but maybe it would lessen
| the power grabs that some small few seem to gravitate
| towards.
|
| I know if I wanted to influence the major elections,
| OpenAI, Google and Meta would be the first places I would
| go. That's a very small group of points of failure.
| Elections recently seem to be quite narrow, maybe they
| were before too though, but that kind of power is a
| silent soft power that really goes unchecked.
|
| If people are more in tune with being mislead, that power
| can slowly degrade.
| tinfoilhatter wrote:
| Most members of the US congress and the current presidential
| administration, are already devoid of trust. I can't speak
| for other countries governments, but it seems to be a fairly
| common situation.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person
|
| That doesn't scale.
|
| During campaign season, they're already running as many
| rallies as they can. Outside the campaign train, smaller Town
| Hall events only reach what, a couple hundred people, tops?
| And at best, they might change the minds of a couple dozen
| people.
|
| EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that people generally don't
| seek to have their mind changed. Someone who is planning on
| voting for one candidate is _extremely_ unlikely to go to a
| rally for the opposition.
| ajuc wrote:
| Every breakthrough in information technology caused disruption
| in the historical sense (i.e. millions of deaths).
|
| From the writing, through organized religion, printing press,
| radio and tv, internet and now ai.
|
| Printing press and reformation wars is obvious, radio and
| totalitarianism is less known, internet and new populism is
| just starting to be recognized for what it is.
|
| Eventually we'll get it regulated and adjust to it. But in the
| meantime it's going to be a wild ride.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| We will adjust. And guess what, before photography, people
| managed somehow. People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread
| malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's
| not. The way people dealt with it was witness testimony and
| physical evidence.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The way people dealt with it was witness testimony and
| physical evidence.
|
| Which are inapplicable today.
|
| > We will adjust
|
| Will we? Maybe years later... per event. It's finally now
| dawning on the majority of Britons that Brexit was a mistake
| they were lied about.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That has nothing to do with GenAI.
| sofixa wrote:
| Yep, it's only made worse by it.
| schnable wrote:
| > Maybe years later...
|
| It is a concern... it took a few centuries for the printing
| press to spur the Catholic/Protestant wars and then finally
| resolve them.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Which are inapplicable today.
|
| No, they are not.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Brexit is a great example how you can just lie by writing
| stuff on the side of a bus, no fake photos or videos
| required
| sofixa wrote:
| Exactly, it proves how easy it is to influence people.
| Which would be even easier with fake photos and videos.
| Teever wrote:
| Of course we will adjust. That is a truism that is besides
| the point.
|
| What matters is how many people will suffer during this
| adjustment period.
|
| How many Rwandan genocides will happen because of this
| technology? How many lynchings or witch burnings?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's not beside the point.you can lie with words, you can
| lie with cartoons and drawings and paintings. You can lie
| with movies.
|
| We will collectively understand that pixels on a screen are
| like cartoons or Photoshop on steroid.
| Teever wrote:
| Marconi demonstrated radio in 1895 and the first
| broadcast radio station started in 1920. By the 1930s
| Adolf Hitler was routinely using the medium to broadcast
| vile propaganda about Jews and others which lead to the
| holocaust in the 1940s.
|
| About 40 years later the Rwandan genocide took place and
| many scholars attribute a preceding radio-based
| propaganda campaign as playing a key role in increasing
| ethnic violence in the aware.
|
| Since then the link between radio and genocide seems to
| have decreased over time but it's likely that this isn't
| so much because humans have a better understanding of the
| medium but more so because propaganda has moved to more
| effective mediums like the internet.
|
| Given that we didn't actually solve the problems with
| radio before moving onto the next medium it isn't likely
| that we'll figure out the problems with these new mediums
| before millions die.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It was easy to spread lies through print and through good
| old fashioned word of mouth too. No radio needed.
|
| And apropos radio, the War of the Worlds radio drama in
| 1938 is know to have made quite some afraid that it's
| real. And plenty of people collected money in communist
| Hungary for the sake of the enslaved Isaura (protagonist
| of a Brazilian soap opera). But most people adjusted and
| understand that radio dramas are a thing, movies are a
| thing, and will adjust to the fact that pixels on a
| screen are just that.
| Teever wrote:
| You seem to be suggesting that there's no noteworthy
| difference in the speed and effectiveness of different
| communication mediums like spoken, written, or radio and
| as such there's no noteworthy difference in the outcome
| of their deployment.
|
| Is that a fair assessment of your comment? Is there a way
| to test your assertion?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| No I'm saying that people adapt, society adapts. Most
| people today don't shit themselves in the cinema thinking
| that the monster will appear among them, they understand
| that characters in TV series are not real and only the
| mentally ill will berate the actor in the street for
| yesterday's episode.
|
| It will take some time but it's in fact quite easy to
| explain it to older relatives if you make a few custom
| examples.
|
| The bigger point is that realism is a red herring. You
| can spread propaganda with hand drawn caricatures just as
| well or even better. It's a panic over nothing. The real
| lever of control is what news to report on and how to
| frame it, what quotes to use, which experts to ask and
| which ones not to. The bottleneck never was at HD
| realism.
| mola wrote:
| Yes, that adjustment could well be monarchy.
|
| I can't see how functioning democracy can survive without
| truth as shared grounds of discussion.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| I don't think the US was a monarchy for its first hundred
| years.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > > I can't see how functioning democracy can survive
| without truth as shared grounds of discussion.
|
| > I don't think the US was a monarchy for its first
| hundred years.
|
| Did the US not have truth as shared grounds of discussion
| for its first hundred years?
| timschmidt wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism has been
| a thing for a very long time.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Right, by which standard truth has never been a shared
| grounds of discussion. I think that there's a big
| difference between "some people lie" and "there's no
| agreement on shared truth."
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That has nothing to do with generated videos though.
| safety1st wrote:
| The media's been lying to us for as long as it has existed.
|
| Prior to the Internet the range of opinions which you could
| gain access to was far more limited. If the media were all
| in agreement on something it was really hard to find a
| counter-argument.
|
| We're so far down the rabbit hole already of bots and
| astroturfing online, I doubt that AI deepfake videos are
| going to be the nail in the coffin for democracy.
|
| The majority of the bot, deepfake and AI lies are going to
| be created by the people who have the most capital.
|
| Just like they owned the traditional media and created the
| lies there.
| afavour wrote:
| We'll _have to_ adjust, certainly. But that doesn 't mean
| nothing bad will happen.
|
| > People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors
| and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not.
|
| And there were things like witch trials where people were
| burnt at the stake!
|
| The resolution was a shared faith in central authority.
| Witness testimony and physical evidence don't scale to
| populations of millions, you have to trust in the person
| getting that evidence. And that trust is what's rapidly
| eroding these days. In politics, in police, in the courts.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Most people's minds are already made up. All this does is add
| some confirmation bias so they can feel better about what they
| were already certain of. I don't think it fundamentally changes
| anyone's opinions.
| sixothree wrote:
| The willingness of people to believe misinformation today is
| astounding. They are already choosing to surround themselves
| with voices of hate and anger. I don't want to see what's next
| for them.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| "See it to believe it" will once again be more important.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Well, maybe it's less about Sora, but how they push the world
| towards making their next product essential: WorldCoin [0],
| Altman's blockchain token system (the one with the alien orb)
| to scan everybody's biometric fingerprint and serve as the only
| Source of Truth for the World - controlled by one private
| company.
|
| It's like the old saying: They create their own ecosystem.
| Circular stock market deals being the most obvious, but the
| WorldCoin has been for years in the making and Altman often
| described it as the only alternative in a post-truth world (the
| one he himself is making of course).
|
| [0] https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/worldcoin-
| crypto-p...
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a non-concern. You can see videos where a specific
| thing happens where people will describe a different thing
| happening. Not some eyewitness off memory. You can look at a
| video and there will be people on Reddit saying stuff that
| didn't happen.
|
| Then you can see any conversation about the video will be even
| more divorced from reality.
|
| None of this requires video manipulation.
|
| The majority of people are idiots on a grand scale. Just search
| any social media for PEMDAS and you will find hordes of people
| debating the value of 2 + 3 / 5 on all sorts of grounds. "It's
| definitely 1. 2+3 =5 then by 5 is 1" stuff like that.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The problem is that we're already post truth.
|
| Just consider how a screenshot of a tweet or made-up headline
| already spreads like a wildfire:
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1980221072512635117
|
| Sora involves far more work than what is required to spread
| misinfo.
|
| Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They care
| about things that confirm their world view, or comfortable
| things. Or they dismiss things that are inconvenient for their
| tribe and focus on things that are inconvenient for other
| tribes.
| nothrabannosir wrote:
| > Finally, people don't really care about the truth.
|
| That same link has two "reader notes" about truth.
|
| The lie is half way around the world etc, but that can also
| be explained by people's short term instincts and reaction to
| outrage. It's not mutually exclusive with caring about truth.
|
| Maybe I'm being uncharitable -- did you mean something like
| "people don't care about truth enough to let it stop them
| from giving into outrage"? Or..?
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Assuming this is all true, what's the most optimistic view
| you can take looking ~20 years out?
|
| How could all of this wind up leading to a much more fair,
| kind, sustainable and prosperous future?
|
| Acknowledging risks is important, but where do YOU want all
| this to go?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| As adults already, we grew up with things that are either
| not relevant or give us the wrong responses to our
| heuristics.
|
| But the kids who grow up with this stuff will just
| integrate into their life and proceed. The society which
| results from that will be something we cannot predict as it
| will be alien to us. Whether it will be better or not --
| probably not.
|
| Humans evolved to spend most of their time with a small
| group of trusted people. By removing ourselves from that we
| have created all sorts of problems that we just aren't
| really that equipped to deal with. If this is solvable or
| not has yet to be seen.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I don't disagree with any points you made, but I do find
| it interesting you refused a prompt to imagine a better
| future, articulate your wants, and practice optimism.
| That's your choice, but a telling one.
| danaris wrote:
| It's really hard to imagine how "truth is harder to find,
| more people lie with impunity, and convince others that
| their lies are true" could have a positive outcome.
|
| Moreover, I think it's really hard overall to imagine a
| _better_ future as long as all of this technology and
| power is in the hands of massively wealthy people who
| have shown their willingness to abuse it to maintain that
| wealth at our expense.
|
| The optimistic future effectively _requires_ some means
| of reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest
| of us.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Yes, but, overwhelmingly we go where we look. Usually
| what is meaningful and worthwhile is hard. Also we get
| better at hard things when we practice doing them.
|
| There is a concept in racing when taking a corner to
| "keep your eyes off the wall", and instead look where you
| want the car to go.
|
| Imo the most scary part of the problems we face isn't
| what you or GP are talking about, it's everyone else's
| reactions to them. The staring at the wall while
| screaming or giving up, and refusing to look where you
| want to go.
|
| It's harder to satisfy our wants if we cant articulate
| them.
| danaris wrote:
| Well, sure--and I am, in general, a very positive person.
|
| But there's a _huge_ difference between (a) "given that
| this thing exists that seems very bad, can you imagine a
| way to a better future?" and (b) "can you imagine ways
| that this thing that seems very bad could actually be
| very good?"
|
| The ways to a better future are _in spite of_ these
| developments, not because of them, and I don 't think
| it's at all helpful to act like that's not the case or be
| all disappointed (and, frankly, a bit condescending) at
| people who refuse to play along with attempts to do so.
|
| And it's possible that (a) above is what you _meant_ ,
| but your wording very much sounded like (b).
| FloorEgg wrote:
| I asked three questions. Two were about the kind of
| future we want. One was about how we might get there. I
| know the "how" question can feel overwhelming. It often
| does for me too, and I think about it a lot.
|
| What I find curious is that no one has really engaged
| with any of these questions yet. Not even to reflect
| personally on why. That's not a criticism, it's an
| observation. I think it's worth asking what makes this
| kind of conversation so difficult.
|
| When I said that declining to imagine a better future was
| telling, I didn't mean it as a put-down. I meant it as a
| challenge. Because when we stop trying to define what
| better looks like, we give up our power to those who will
| define it for us. History shows where that leads. That's
| how authoritarianism takes root; not only through force,
| but through the quiet surrender of imagination and
| personal responsibility.
|
| If my earlier tone came across as condescending, that
| wasn't my intent. My intention is tough love. I believe
| that acknowledging problems matters, but it's not enough.
| If we stop there, we trade agency for frustration. I'd
| rather see us wrestle with what we want, even if it's
| hard, than resign ourselves to cynicism.
|
| So I'll ask again: what kind of future would you actually
| want?
|
| EDIT: I just realized that I missed part of an answer in
| your earlier comment, which I commend you for now. I
| apologize for not recognizing it before.
|
| You said:
|
| The optimistic future effectively requires some means of
| reclaiming some of that power and wealth for the rest of
| us.
|
| Kudos. That's a start.
| mat_b wrote:
| > Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They
| care about things that confirm their world view. Or they
| dismiss things that are inconvenient for their tribe and
| focus on things that are inconvenient for other tribes.
|
| People have always been this way though. The tribes are just
| organized differently in the internet age.
| LexiMax wrote:
| I strongly suspect future generations are going to look
| back on the age of trying to cram the entire world into one
| of several shared social spaces and say "What were those
| idiots thinking?"
| mcphage wrote:
| In our defense (slightly), it was never really possible
| before, so we didn't previously have an opportunity to
| learn what a civilization-shatteringly bad idea it was.
| godelski wrote:
| Not to mention that the president posts AI slop
| frequently[0]. He even posted, and took down, a video
| promising people a "med bay". A fictional device that just
| cures everything.
|
| [0] Trump as "King Trump" flying a jet that dumps shit onto
| protesters https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115
| 3982516232...
|
| [1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/09/30/medbed-trump-ai-
| video...
| code4life wrote:
| > Finally, people don't really care about the truth.
|
| What is truth? Pontius Pilate
| marshfarm wrote:
| We're probably post-narrative and post-lexical (words) but
| haven't become aware of what to possibly update these tools
| with. Post-truth is an abstraction rooted in the arbitrary.
|
| Reality is specific. Actions, materials. Words and language
| are arbitrary, they're processes, and they're simulations.
| They don't reference things, they represent them in
| metaphors, so sure they have "meaning" but the meanings
| reduce the specifics in reality which have many times the
| meaning possibility to linearity, cause and effect. That's
| not conforming to the reality that exists, that's severely
| reducing, even dumbing down reality.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| There is a reality which exists. Words have meaning. Words
| are more or less true as the meaning they convey conforms
| more or less well to the reality that exists. So no, truth
| is not rooted in the arbitrary. Quite the opposite.
|
| Or at least, words _had_ meaning. As we become post-
| lexical, it becomes harder to tell how well any sequence of
| words corresponds to reality. This is post truth - not that
| there is no reality, but that we no longer can judge the
| truth content of a statement. And that 's a _huge_ problem,
| both for our own thought life, and for society.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Oh well, I'll put it out there. If people cared about
| verified provable truths, religion of any kind wouldn't
| exist.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > If people cared about verified provable truths, religion
| of any kind wouldn't exist.
|
| Can you provide a verified proof of this statement please?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Really? Everything about religion is fantasy and
| unprovable. Unless you believe that the earth is only
| 6500 years old, created in 7 days then a few centuries
| later someone built a boat that took two of each animal
| in the entire world to save them.
|
| Then fast forward to a man being born from a virgin that
| rose from the dead three days after being crucified.
| OJFord wrote:
| It just makes trusted/verified sources more important, and more
| people to care about it. I wouldn't be terrified for politics
| so much as the raised barrier to entry (and concentration) of
| the press - people will pay attention to the BBC, Guardian,
| Times, but not (even less so) independentjourno.com; those
| sources will be more sceptical of whistleblowers and freelance
| investigative contributions, etc.
| Razengan wrote:
| Well, usually when there's a mass problem, some technology
| eventually eliminates it.
|
| Like cars making horse manure in cities a non-issue
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w61d-NBqafM)
|
| Maybe the solution to everybody lying would be some way to
| directly access a person's actual memories from their brains..
| pdntspa wrote:
| Just yesterday I saw a Sora-generated video that purported to
| be someone filming a failed HIMARS missile failing and falling
| on stopped traffic and exploding on the 5 in Camp Pendleton on
| Saturday. (IRL they were doing some kind of live-fire drill and
| it did actually involve projectiles flying over the freeway.)
|
| While there were some debris instances IRL the freeway was
| completely shut down per the governors orders and nobody was
| harmed. (Had he not done this, that same debris may have hit
| motorists, so this was a good call on his part)
|
| You could see the "Sora" watermark in the video, but it was
| still popular enough to make it in my reels feed that is
| normally always a different kind of content.
|
| In this case whoever made that was sloppy enough to use a
| turnkey service like Sora. I can easily generate videos
| suitable for reels using my GPU and those programs don't
| (visibly) watermark.
|
| We are in for dark times. Who knows how many AI-generated
| propaganda videos are slipping under the radar because the
| operator is actually half-skilled.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > I can easily generate videos suitable for reels using my
| GPU and those programs don't (visibly) watermark.
|
| Curious what you used. I have an RTX 5090 and I've tried
| using some local video generators and the results are
| absolute garbage unless I'm asking for something extremely
| simple and uncreative like "woman dancing in a field".
| skirmish wrote:
| A quick search found this example 18 second video generated
| on 3090: https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/
| 1kp5jb8/da...
|
| I am pretty sure what you want is doable on a 5090 with
| some effort but it will not be just a text prompt to video.
| More like input key frames as images and interpolate video
| between them.
| highwaylights wrote:
| I'm surprised this isn't a bigger concern given that:
|
| For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of
| anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and
| put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing
| (and rapidly)
|
| We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years,
| so it's now become normalized
|
| Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe
| anything that supports their political alignment
|
| People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and
| when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the
| belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with
| more garbage to support something they really _want_ to believe
|
| It's a weird time to be alive
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Absolutely! And don't kid yourself into thinking you are
| immune from this either. You can find support of basically
| anything you want to believe. And your friendly LLM will be
| more than happy to confirm it too!
|
| Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth even
| means. Is there even such a thing?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| People forget that critical thinking means thinking
| critically about everything, even things you already think
| are true because they fit into your worldview.
| antod wrote:
| Let alone the hordes who think "critical thinking" just
| means disagreeing with things.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Honestly it goes right back to philosophy and what truth
| even means. Is there even such a thing?
|
| Truth absolutely is a thing. But sometimes, it's nuanced,
| and people don't like nuance. They want something they can
| say in a 280-character tweet that they can use to "destroy"
| someone online.
| overvale wrote:
| Other people have said this, but I don't think it's going to be
| any different than living in a world where people can spread
| rumors orally or print lies with a printing press. We've been
| dealing with those challenges for a long time.
|
| Our ways of thinking and our courts understand that you can't
| trust what people say and you can't trust what you read. We've
| internalized that as a society.
|
| Looking back, there seems to have been a brief period of time
| when you could actually trust photographs and videos. I think
| in the long run, this period of time will be seen as a
| historical anomaly, and video will be no more trusted than the
| printed or spoken word is today.
| truelson wrote:
| We are having a huge amount of technological change (we haven't
| even learned how to handle social media as a society yet...).
| We're experiencing a global loss in trust, and things may fall
| apart for a bit until our society develops a better immune
| system to such ills. It is scary.
|
| I think we may revert back to trusting only smaller groups of
| people, being skeptical of anything outside that group,
| becoming a bit more tribal. I hope without too many deleterious
| effects, but a lot could happen.
|
| But humans, as a species, are survivors. And we, with our
| thinking machines will figure out ultimately how to deal with
| it all. I just hope the pain of this transition is not
| catastrophic.
| robofanatic wrote:
| If you don't like any thing digital (image/video/text) then
| it's definitely AI generated. I guess AI has kind of killed the
| "democratization of news" introduced by social media.
| csallen wrote:
| People have been tricked by counterfeits ever since the
| invention of writing (or even drawing) first made it possible
| for a person to communicate without being physically present.
|
| At that moment, it simultaneously became possible to create
| "deep fakes" by simply forging a signature and tricking readers
| as to who authored the information.
|
| And even before that, just with speaking, it was already
| possible to spread lies and misinformation, and such things
| happened frequently, often with disastrous consequences. Just
| think of all the witch hunts, false religions, and false rumors
| that have been spread through the history of mankind.
|
| All of this is to say that mankind is quite used to dealing
| with information that has questionable authorship,
| authenticity, or accuracy. And mankind is quite used to
| suffering as a result of these challenges. It's nothing
| particularly new that it's moving into a new media format
| (video), especially considering that this is a relatively new
| format in the history of mankind to begin with.
|
| (FWIW, the best defense against deep fakes has always been to
| pay attention to the _source_ of information rather than just
| the content. A video about XYZ coming from XYZ 's social media
| account is more likely to be accurate than if it comes from
| elsewhere. An article in the NYTimes that you _read_ in the
| NYTimes is more likely to be authentic than a screenshot of an
| article you read from some social media account. Etc. It 's not
| a perfect measure -- nothing is -- but I'd say it's the main
| reason we can have trust despite thousands of years of deep
| fakes.)
|
| IMO the fact that social media -- and the internet in general
| -- have decentralized media while also decoupling it from
| geography is less precedented and more worrisome.
| kazinator wrote:
| Here is the thing: we should _never_ have trusted photographs
| and motion pictures.
|
| Fakery isn't new, only the product of scale and quality at
| which it is becoming possible.
| kazinator wrote:
| Being convinced that real videos are AI is arguably a better
| position than being convinced that real videos convey the iron-
| clad truth.
|
| Everything is manipulated or generated until proven otherwise.
| anarticle wrote:
| I think their game theoretic aim was to completely discredit
| video online. Just as we don't accept text in general as truth
| or image when we see it, we are being flooded with completely
| fake vids so people can shake the idea that videos are truth.
|
| It smells of e/acc, effective altruist ethics which are not my
| favorite, but I don't work at OpenAI so I don't have a say I
| can only interpret.
|
| I agree, but we will likely continue down this road...
| shnp wrote:
| Flawless AI generated videos will result in video footage not
| being trusted.
|
| This will simply take us back about 150 years to the time
| before the camera was common.
|
| The transition period may be painful though.
| roadside_picnic wrote:
| > the final pour that cements us into our post-truth world.
|
| I find it a bit more concerning that anyone would not already
| understand how deeply we exist in a "post-truth" world. Every
| piece of information we've consumed for the last few decades
| has increasingly been shaped by algorithms optimizing someone
| else's target.
|
| But the real danger of post-truth is when there is a still
| enough of a veneer of truth that you can use distortions to
| effectively manipulate the public. Losing that veneer is
| essentially a collapse of the whole system, which will have
| consequences I don't think we can really understand.
|
| The pre and early days of social media were riddled with
| various "leaks" of private photos and video. But what does it
| mean to leak a nude photo of a celebrity when you can just as
| easily generate a photo that is indistinguishable? The entire
| reason leaks like that were so popular is precisely because
| people wanted a glimpse into something _real_ about the private
| life of these screen personalities (otherwise 'leaks' and
| 'nude scenes' would have the same value). As image generation
| reaches the limit, it will be impossible to ever really
| distinguish between voyeurism and imagination.
|
| Similarly we live in an age of mass surveillance, but what does
| surveillance footage mean when it can be trivially faked. Think
| of how radicalizing surveillance footage has been over the past
| few decades. Consider for example the video of the Rodney King
| beating. Increasingly such a video could not be trusted.
|
| > I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.
|
| If you aren't already terrified enough of the _present_ of
| politics, then I wouldn 't be worried about what Sora brings us
| tomorrow. I honestly think what we'll see soon is not
| increasingly more powerful authoritarian systems, but the break
| down of systems of control everywhere. As these systems _over-
| extend_ themselves they will collapse. The peak of social media
| power was to _not_ let it go further than it was a few years
| ago, Sora represents a larger breakdown of these systems of
| control.
| uvaursi wrote:
| Agreed, but this is mostly coming from people who would
| normally discredit you bashing MSM as a kook/conspiracy
| theorist.
|
| People forget, or didn't see, all the staged catastrophes in
| the 90s that were shortly afterwards pulled off the channel
| once someone pointed out something obvious (f.e. dolls
| instead of human victims, wrong location footage, and so on).
|
| But if you were there, and if you saw that, and then saw them
| pull it off and pretend like it didn't happen for rest of the
| day, then this AI thing is a nothing burger.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| Or people will just stop believing random things they see
| online. You are underestimating people imo.
| jmkni wrote:
| For sure.
|
| I consider myself pretty on the ball when it comes to following
| this stuff, and even I've been caught off guard by some videos,
| I've seen videos on Reddit I thought were real until I realised
| what subreddit I was on
| mentalgear wrote:
| The fact that OpenAI is pushing Sora, and Altman now even hinting
| at introducing "erotic roleplay"[0] makes it obvious: openAI has
| stopped being a real AI research lab. Now, they're just another
| desperate player in a no-moat market, scrambling to become the
| primary platform of this hype era and imprison users onto their
| platform, just like Microsoft and Facebook did before in the PC
| and social era.
|
| [0] https://www.404media.co/openai-sam-altman-interview-
| chatgpt-...
| gilfoy wrote:
| Why is it one or the other? They have enough money to do both.
| mentalgear wrote:
| But if you followed them, there are focusing only on product
| for the last 2 years. The grand GPT-5 and their scaling laws,
| from which all their LLM AGI hopes originated, turned out to
| be a dud.
| sixothree wrote:
| The amount of animal abuse videos I've seen is a bit
| disturbing. It only demonstrates how careless they have been,
| possibly intentionally. I know people on HN have been
| describing the various reasons why OpenAI has not been a good
| player, but seeing it first-hand is visceral in a way that
| makes me concerned about them as a company.
| bilekas wrote:
| I got the feeling when this was released that it was just another
| metric to justify further investment, they were guaranteed to
| have a lot of users, they can turn around and say "well we have 2
| huge applications and were just getting started" investors don't
| care too much about product quality we've seen, just large
| numbers.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| It's made my non-sora feeds nearly inconsumable, which I admitted
| to myself was probably a good thing.
| schnable wrote:
| OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once, trying
| to leverage the value of the frontier model, brand value, and
| massive number of eyeballs they own. Sora is just one of many.
| Some will fail and maybe some will succeed.
|
| It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create
| a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes
| to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to do with
| Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't think
| there's more to read into it than that.
| truelson wrote:
| It's to their benefit to try everything right now. And quickly.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > It seems true that no company has used frontier models to
| create a product with business value commensurate with the cost
| it takes to train and run them.
|
| Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been
| profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next
| model.
|
| I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they
| reduced their free tier limits.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| On some level they know that LLMs alone won't lead to AGI so
| they have to take a shotgun approach to diversify, and also
| because integrating some parts of all these paths is more
| likely to lead to the outcome they want than going all in on
| one.
|
| Also because they have the funding to do it.
|
| Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox,
| etc,
|
| This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech
| startup/company in an important new category looks like.
| xnx wrote:
| > OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once
|
| It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing
| machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity
| would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing,
| etc.
|
| OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an
| (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora)
| and other competitors.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| >It seems true that no company has used frontier models to
| create a product with business value commensurate with the cost
| it takes to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to
| do with Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't
| think there's more to read into it than that.
|
| It makes them look desperate though. Nothing like starting tons
| of services at once to show you have a vision
| mortsnort wrote:
| The massive cost of this product is unique though (not even
| counting the copyright lawsuits/settlements coming). I can't
| think of any side projects that require this level of
| investment.
| truelson wrote:
| I love Cal. I really, really take his thoughts on many things to
| heart for well over a decade now.
|
| I think he's being a bit harsh here. And there are some
| confounding factors why.
|
| Yes, we have an AI bubble. Yes there's been a ton of hype that
| can't be met with reality in the short term. That's normal for
| large changes (and this is a large technological change). OpenAI
| may have some rough days ahead of it soon, but just like the
| internet, there's still a lot of signal here and a lot of work to
| still be done. Going through Suna+Sora videos just last night was
| still absoutely magical. There's still so much here.
|
| But, OpenAI is also becoming, to use a Ben Thompson term, an
| aggregator. If it's where you go to solve many problems,
| advertising and more is a natural fit. It's not certain who comes
| out on top of the space (or if it can be shared), but there are
| huge rewards coming in future years, even after a bubble has
| popped.
|
| Cal is having a very strong reaction here. I value it, but I wish
| it was more nuanced.
| kulahan wrote:
| LLMs are only valuable to me at the moment explicitly _because_
| ads are not part of the scene. Maybe for a while others will
| use it, but it will be on the exact same treadmill as anything
| else ad-based: you will become the product, any recommendations
| are worthless trash, and it is oriented to show as many ads as
| possible, rather than providing useful content.
|
| Ads destroy... pretty much everything they touch. It's a
| natural fit, but a terrible one.
| righthand wrote:
| Any Llm generation tools are spam generation tools. AI-slop ===
| Spam. How big is the market for spam again?
| mentalgear wrote:
| Unfortunately due to the generation / verification ratio, spam
| and misinformation are indeed their most low-hanging fruits.
| It's so much easier to generate LLM output than to verify it,
| which is probably why Google held back the Transformer
| Architecture.
| kulahan wrote:
| This isn't even remotely true. In its current iteration, it's
| one of the best jumping-off points for getting up to speed on
| the basics of a new topic.
| righthand wrote:
| So is spam if you only need a summarized version of the
| financial difficulties of princes in Nigeria. Or the kinds of
| people doctors can't stand.
|
| Your jumping off point is a cliff into a pile of leaves. It
| looks correct and comfy but will hurt your butt taking it for
| granted. You're telling people to jump and saying "it'll get
| better eventually just keep jumping and ignore the pain!"
| kulahan wrote:
| Nope, spam is specifically unwanted. Also, I'm saying "jump
| in the leaves, it's fun if you don't try leaping in from a
| mile up" and you're saying "NO LEAVES KILL PEOPLE ALL THE
| TIME" lol.
| righthand wrote:
| What if I don't want to use Llms, but people keep telling
| me that it's fine and I should. Isn't that spam?
|
| What if my reason isn't, "I like typing code" but
| instead, "we don't need more Googles doing Google things
| and abusing privacy."
|
| Then personally the whole thing is spam.
|
| Regardless of what the reasons for and against Llms maybe
| doesn't obfuscate that the primary use case for generated
| content has been to scam and spam people.
|
| That spam scam can be simply getting people to pour their
| personal private info into an Llm or it can be ads or a
| generated lie. Regardless it's unwanted to a lot of
| people. And the history of that tech and attempt at
| normalizing it are founded in spam techniques.
|
| Even the gratuitous search for AGI is spammed on us as
| these companies take tax payer money and build out
| infrastructure that's actually available to 0% of the
| public for use.
|
| Like I discredit in my mind anyone that cites Chatgpt as
| a source.
| rpjt wrote:
| I have no FOMO when it comes to Sora. None whatsoever.
| Authenticity is becoming more important day by day.
| kbos87 wrote:
| I could see Sora having a significant negative impact on short
| form video products like TikTok if they don't quickly and
| accurately find a way to categorize its use. A steady stream of
| AI generated video content hurts the value prop of short form
| video in more than one way... It quickly desensitizes you and
| takes the surprise out that drives consumption of a lot of
| content. It also of course leaves you feeling like you can't
| trust anything you see.
| huevosabio wrote:
| Didn't explicitly think about this, but you're right. I already
| dismiss off the bat a lot of surprising video content because I
| don't trust it.
| kulahan wrote:
| Do people on the dopamine drip really care how real their
| content is? Tons and tons of it is staged or modified anyways.
| I'm not sure there's anything Real(tm) on TikTok anyways.
| wobfan wrote:
| Thought the same. The human-generated content is just as
| brainless as the AI-generated slop. People who watched the
| first will also watch the latter. This will not change a lot,
| I think.
| bemmu wrote:
| I find Sora refreshing in that I don't have to worry about
| being tricked by something fake. It's just a fun multiplayer
| slopfest.
| duxup wrote:
| It certainly seems there are some who don't care.
|
| You always get the "who cares if it is fake" folks and even
| on reddit folks will point out something is AI and inevitably
| folks "who cares".
|
| But I'm not sure how many people that is or what kind of
| content they care or don't care about.
| janwl wrote:
| I mean, it's entertainment content. It's like saying a
| movie is fake, they are actors playing roles. Of course.
| Who cares?
| duxup wrote:
| Depends on if the content is expected to be real or not.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I mean, this is basically already status quo for YouTube
| Shorts. Tons and tons of shorts are AI-voice over either AI
| video or stock video covering some pithy thing in no actual
| depth, just piggybacking off of trending topics. And TikTok has
| had the same sort of content for even longer.
|
| The "value" of short video content is already somewhat of a
| poor value proposition for this and other reasons. It lets you
| just obliterate time which can be handy in certain situations,
| but it also ruins your attention span.
| gdulli wrote:
| > A company that still believes that its technology was
| imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would
| be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as
| we know it, wouldn't be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads
| against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling.
|
| But also, a company that earnestly believes that it's about to
| disrupt most labor is going to want to grab as many of those
| bucks as possible before people no longer have income.
| xwowsersx wrote:
| This take feels like classic Cal Newport pattern-matching:
| something looks vaguely "consumerish," so it must signal decline.
| It's a huge overreach.
|
| Whether OpenAI becomes a truly massive, world-defining company is
| an open question, but it's not going to be decided by Sora.
| Treating a research-facing video generator as if it's OpenAI's
| attempt at the next TikTok is just missing the forest for the
| trees. Sora isn't a product bet, it's a technology demo or a
| testbed for video and image modeling. They threw a basic
| interface on top so people could actually use it. If they shut
| that interface down tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing about
| the underlying progress in generative modeling.
|
| You can argue that OpenAI lacks focus, or that they waste energy
| on these experiments. That's a reasonable discussion. But calling
| it "the beginning of the end" because of one side project is just
| unserious. Tech companies at the frontier run hundreds of little
| prototypes like this... most get abandoned, and that's fine.
|
| The real question about OpenAI's future has nothing to do with
| Sora. It's whether large language and multimodal models
| eventually become a zero-margin commodity. If that happens,
| OpenAI's valuation problem isn't about branding or app strategy,
| it's about economics. Can they build a moat beyond "we have the
| biggest model"? Because that won't hold once opensource and fine-
| tuned domain models catch up.
|
| So sure, Sora might be a distraction. But pretending that a minor
| interface launch is some great unraveling of OpenAI's trajectory
| is just lazy narrative-hunting.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| I agree. My bet is that OpenAI will not fullfill its mission of
| developing AGI by 2035. And I would be surprised if they ever
| did. As much as they might want to, there is only so many
| dreams you can whisper into rich people's ears before they tell
| you to go away. And without rich people's money, OpenAI will
| fall like a house of cards. The wealthy won't have infinite
| patience
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There are also interesting things one could do with models like
| Sora, depending how it actually performs in practice: prompting
| to segment, for example; and the thing could very possibly, if
| it's fast enough etc. become a foundation for robotics.
| ilickpoolalgae wrote:
| > It's unclear whether this app will last. One major issue is the
| back-end expense of producing these videos. For now, OpenAI
| requires a paid ChatGPT Plus account to generate your own
| content. At the $20 tier, you can pump out up to 50 low-
| resolution videos per month. For a whopping $200 a month, you can
| generate more videos at higher resolutions. None of this compares
| favorably to competitors like TikTok, which are exponentially
| cheaper to operate and can therefore not only remain truly free
| for all users, but actually pay their creators .
|
| fwiw, there's no requirement to have a subscription to create
| content.
| sosodev wrote:
| This article makes the claim that OpenAI, and AI in general, is
| massively overhyped because OpenAI is looking to sell slop. I'm
| not sure I can agree with that basic premise.
|
| Whether AGI does or does not materialize sometime soon doesn't
| matter. OpenAI, like every company who wants to raise massive
| amounts of money, needs to show huge growth numbers _now_. It
| seems like the unfortunate, simple truth is that slop is a growth
| hack.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| OpenAI is steering significant amounts of traffic away from
| Google and ChatGPT is a fairly common name that extends beyond
| awareness of the company (or even what the word it means
| specifically).
|
| Not nearly on the level of "Kleenex" or "Google" as a term, but
| impressive given that other companies have spent decades trying
| to make a similar dent.
| rchaud wrote:
| So what though? At best they will stuff it with ads like Google
| has done and become what is basically Bing w/ Copilot. That
| isn't going to pay back the $500 billion or however much
| they're trying to raise.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| it means I highly doubt it's the "beginning of the end" as
| postulated... unless it's a very very long end
|
| as another example: tesla has strung along a known
| overvaluation for a long time now and there's no end in sight
| despite a number of blunders
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| When you have this much money, you can afford to chase AGI, and
| assign a few people to make an app. The app might be frivolous,
| but it keep OpenAI in the public view. It's money well spent on
| marketing.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "It wasn't that long ago that Sam Altman was still _comparing the
| release of GPT-5 to the testing of the first atomic bomb_ , and
| many commentators took Dario Amodei at his word when he
| proclaimed* 50% of white collar jobs might soon be automated* by
| LLM-based tools.
|
| A company that still believes that its technology was imminently
| going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so
| powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know
| it, wouldn't be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against
| deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling. They also
| wouldn't be entertaining the idea, _as Altman did last week_ ,
| that they might soon start offering an age-gated version of
| ChatGPT so that adults could enjoy"
| freefaler wrote:
| They might be forced to do so because the current inference
| pricing is not really covered by the 20$ monthly fee. Who knows
| what they have promised to the investors and the real cashflow
| is hard to be certain about with the circular nature of cross-
| investing between the biggest players.
| bdcravens wrote:
| More likely it's the beginning of the end for TikTok, since the
| amount of posts that use seems to be flooding the platform,
| lowering trust and credibility in each video.
| fishmicrowaver wrote:
| Hmm I have my doubts. I don't really understand the appeal of
| hyper-consumerism, brand focus, and big SM platform engagement.
| But I look over at my wife and she is clearly plugged in to a
| giant worldwide cultural movement of womens interests, product
| recommendations, and politics. It also appears to be the case
| that women are less likely to engage with AI. It's one of the
| big reasons I think it's a massive blunder to pursue AI
| erotica. I think a big part of the TikTok user base (women)
| will have to be persuaded to jump on the AI bandwagon and I'm
| not sure the industry is pursuing any products or features to
| woo that market.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| > wouldn't be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against
| deep fake videos
|
| This isn't a money making venture for them, and you basically
| admitted as much. They poured no doubt massive amounts of money
| into developing this and have little hope of earning it back
| soon. This is an attempt to keep up with other ai companies also
| developing video models in order to not look behind to investors.
| Making it available to users is similarly about increasing active
| user counts in order to look more successful. If people
| incidentally get off to it that's not their concern
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Sora is about data gathering. This take is too simplistic.
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