“I felt terrible…,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on killing Sora

On March 24, OpenAI announced to kill its text-to-video generation tool, Sora. The move came as a shock, given it had been just six months since Sora’s launch. In the aftermath, OpenAI also had to pull the plug on its $1 billion deal with The Walt Disney Company to bring characters onto the platform.

Now, for the first time since Sora’s discontinuation, Chief Executive Sam Altman appeared on iHeartPodcasts’ “Mostly Human,” hosted by tech journalist Laurie Segall. During the conversation, Sam Altman said that the decision to shut down Sora ultimately came down to how the company prioritised and allocated its resources.

Altman said, OpenAI needed to “concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies,” highlighting its reasons to kill Sora.

“I love Sora. I love generated videos and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing and we can help with that,” he added.

Altman also recalled his conversation about the Sora shutdown with Josh D’Amaro, the Chief Executive Officer at The Walt Disney Company. 

“The very first thing that the new Disney CEO Josh, said to me, and I felt, like, terrible…,” said Altman. 

“He’s like, ‘I get it.’ But it’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work,”

Atlam also highlighted plans for integrating Sora into ChatGPT, but the company ultimately chose not to go ahead with it. He stated that the feature could encourage addictive behaviour, similar to how social media platforms keep users engaged for long periods. He called it a “very tough resourcing call.”

Altman also said, “I did not expect three or six months ago to be at this point we’re at now, where something very big and important is about to happen again with this next generation of models and the agents they can power.”