- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253
This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.
Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.
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Bye Felicia
Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way
Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with “AI”, allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).
you mean giving away billions of dollars of computer with no monetisation strategy was bad? man who would have thought. not sam, apparently. if only there were like, some way to have realised that the goal of business is to earn money
Best news I’ve heard all day! POP THE SLOP
As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I’ve gotten this year.
Congrats! 🥳🥳🥳
Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll have other tools for quickly and cheaply creating falsified videos and the like. Faith in the veracity of video evidence probably won’t be coming back.
In the dotcom era, the push was to create lots of free services. Once you had enough users, you wanted to see how many would be willing to pay for it. There was a formula that justified getting more investment (it varied by domain). Back then, almost nobody other than Amazon survived the hard shaking of the tree.
We may be coming up to the point where customer acquisition through free service ends. Whatsever is left standing will move to the next round.
Everybody else gets dropped on the floor.
OpenAI said it will discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024, without providing a reason for the decision.
That is the strongest indication this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble. Sora burned a ton of processing power, with no clear value proposition, just to keep the hype cycle going a little longer. Shutting down without explanation leaves the most likely one: they are out of helium to pump into the balloon. And if that balloon isn’t inflating, it’s deflating.
It’s not and probably the opposite.
When Sora launched it was way ahead. Seedance 2’s release was notably better than any of the other video gen models, Sora included.
The market is getting commoditized because there’s no moat and OpenAI hasn’t led on pretty much any release for a while now other than Sora, which they’re probably falling behind on now.
This is the opposite of a burst from a tech standpoint, even if OpenAI as a company starts to pop.
TL;DR: This is likely happening because the tech accelerated across the industry in ways OpenAI can’t catch back up to, not because it’s lagging.
Upvoted for a different perspective, but I suspect it ends in the same place.
OpenAI is kept solvent by investor capital, and capital is kept flowing by the perception of OpenAI being the market leader. Seedance being a better model, enough to cause OpenAI to exit the market, still ruptures the perception of value. In a market with no clear profitability path, that’s ground falling away.
It also can’t be simply commoditized because generations (I’m sure even Seedance) are expensive and still not good enough for production use, even if 50% of their consumer base might boycott if a major studio even did use it in production. Commoditization can’t occur when there’s still no economically self-sustaining, market-acceptable “good enough” product. Without that, even if the leader changes, it’s a race between lemmings (sorry) off the cliff.
It was a weak attempt to keep relevance when faced against Gemini and Claude. But it’s completely unnecessary now that OpenAI has contracted with the government. They get all that sweet tax payer money and get to repurpose a ton of GPUs making stupid videos to supporting that new gov contract.
Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.
Chime in if you disagreee, but there’s really only 2 reasons a company like OpenAI shuts down a core service like Sora:
- The service is hemorrhaging money to the point of financial unsustainability.
- The service is not popular enough to drive investor hype as a “loss leader”
We already know that OpenAI is losing money on their generative “AI” products across the board, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, and the economic woes that come from rising hardware prices, oil and gas shortages, and another pointless war in the middle east only make the situation worse for them money-wise.
And so that really just leaves me to conclude that Sora has not maintained the level of popularity and growth needed to impress investors as Q1 comes to a close. Whether it’s users, subscriptions, or time, they must have looked at the numbers and really didn’t like what they saw.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the ridiculous “AI” bubble, and the start of a new tech sector correction.
I suspect it’s that they got eclipsed by ByteDance with Seedance 2.0.
The video for that model is really good and makes Sora look pretty meh, and it may have been that current work on a next gen Sora wasn’t going to be competitive enough.
The worst thing a lab can do right now is look like they are falling behind (i.e. Meta), especially with OpenAI planning for an IPO.
So on top of the lackluster “social media” offering tied to Sora they decided to shutter the entire product line of video and pivot to enterprise (where they’ve already lost significant market share to Anthropic).
They’re in a pretty meh place at the moment overall tbh. I’m skeptical they’ll recover.
(But I wouldn’t mistake their fumbling for an industry wide shift on AI in general or even video AI.)
There’s a third option this time.
It uses a lot of resources they can use immediately for the military contract that will now inevitably form the backbone of the company and effectively will mean they have won the AI war. Anthropic fumbled by not doing what the military wanted immediately, and showing a minimal backbone publicly.
I listened to a Vox’s Today Explained that tackled this whole contract. What was said on there was that Anthropic had in some very minor stipulations about AI and war, but were rejected. OpenAI came in with their offer and then after getting it, the contract they signed had the wording that Anthropic was asking for.
It basically came down to, Altman was the favorite of the Trump administration and got the contract because of behind the scenes bullshit and because Dario was/is super critical of Trump when it comes to AI safety.
In addition, marketing AI with image generation is a lot easier of a way to impress the public than the more technical applications, or the frightening prospect of the “security” applications, but image generation is only a good use of resources as advertisment, and the introductory phase is over.
I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.
Fake of highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating on line proportinf that the Netanyahu hand videos, and random videos of Israeli strikes on Palestine (which I assume are to discredit actual video of the atrocities happening there), have been going viral for awhile now.
Advertising is probably one of the few industries that can use image generation and video generation via AI LLM in a way that would actually cut costs but the downside is people are increasingly militantly against ads and they are against AI generated content including ads, so this isn’t likely to become the reality any time soon.
If the McDonald’s ad and others like it had been better vetted for AI uncanny valley aspects and hallucinations that cause trucks to transform into short bus versions of themselves mid ad spot etc, the public might not have paid attention at all.
And lots of those same advertising firms are using AI to their benefit behind the scenes to purchase ad space. But using AI in ads in a public facing way is a dream out of reach for them for now because they bungled it so bad.
Or 3 massive liability/ lawsuit /investigation about to be announced.
Finger crossed, my friend! Fingers crossed.
The market for professional video is fairly small, and most of the cost is in sales. ie. the advertising agency, or movie/show pitch that demands the producers get rich independent of production costs.
. Ai companies want to replace all YouTube , and TikTok,creators with ai video content farms, capturing the creator market and if it scales the streaming market. Instead of getting a cut gen ai would let platforms eat the whole pie alone.
A significant number of smaller creators I watch have drastically increased the quality of animations and b roll by using ai tools.
These tool are a big deal to a big market.
Oooooohhhh is it starting? I hope it’s starting 🤩
POP! POP ALREADY!!! PLEASE!!!
Just a long deflation coming.
Why stop there? Just shut the whole company down.
Best I can do is shutting the whole planet down.
Eh, we had a good run.
…did we?
Eh, we had a run.
Bet
Oh it’s part of the military machine now. It’s never going away now. OpenAI won the war, Anthropic fumbled the ball by not openly capitulating to the fascist state. The competition just hasn’t realized it yet.
All people ever did with sora was make doorbell cam footage of dogs watergunning old ladies and gorillas getting sucked into tornados. AI image and video generation is just a tool to make a funny joke, it’s incapable of doing anything serious in its current state, and with the amount of processing power it needs just to be a digital circus clown it’s unlikely to become anything more.
AI image generation is amazing for replacing stock photos, and not bad at replacing clipart and porn images.
AI video generation is ok at replacing very simple videos without continuity or physics, but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation or mindless scrolling, there’s just no real way to get anyone to pay for them.
That’s aside from the fact that sora could’ve been great for generating generic stock footage/b-roll, but the way they implemented it was to generate a script, then audio, then video, which meant that it really struggled to generate anything without a focal point, ie what it would actually be useful for.
… but their only real applications are for spreading misinformation …
There’s a ton of that going around with sora, but for all I know it could be a smalll group of people. According to their pricing page, 140 bucks a month normally (50% off right now lol) will get you almost 5000 videos a year. Seems plenty to spread a bunch of shit.
There’s also 100 YouTube channels of “real life Pokémon”. What will we ever do without those???
GOOD. Bubble grew a bigger hole letting the air out. Disney removed their $1B investment so let’s hope more do too in the near future to keep ripping that hole wider, yes.
But muh slop
