The Sora Shutdown — OpenAI’s Hard Tradeoffs

My kids and I have had a lot of fun on Sora. We created a whole video series about a human hamburger;) So it surprised me when OpenAI announced they were shutting it down.

The narrative around AI is that it can do everything.

You can build infinite products and touch every vertical at massive scale. OpenAI should be better positioned to live that promise than any other company.

Still, they chose to focus toward reasoning models and enterprise capability and deprioritized one of the most hyped consumer products in AI.

It’s a reminder that even at that scale, with seemingly unlimited access to talent and compute, you still can’t do everything at once.

I’ve always been sensitive that I’m the person who says “NO” in the board meeting. But it’s somewhat helpful to see that the most resourced company in AI is making hard trade-offs.

It probably tells you something about where we are in the cycle.