OpenAI now gets to decide which type of product assassin it will become

Summary

OpenAI on Wednesday announced the death of its controversial Sora video creation tool, just two days after publishing a guide on how to use it well. Like so many AI products, Sora was capable of creating revolting content and blatant copyright abuse. OpenAI tidied up those messes and then signed a deal with Disney that saw the House of Mouse promise to inject $1 billion into the AI upstart and explore using its tools. On Monday, OpenAI was still promoting safe use of Sora on its website. On Tuesday it used a less visible channel, an X post, to announce “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app ... We’ll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work.” Disney then bailed on its deal. Thus endeth OpenAI’s video generation efforts, for now at least. The death of Sora follows last week’s Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI intends to refocus on business users. It’s also OpenAI’s second recent rapid reversal, after the January decision to deprecate the GPT-4o model just nine months after releasing it, and with just two weeks’ notice. Technology buyers know that their suppliers sometimes kill products. Google has often been cast as a product-slaying villain, even prompting the creation of killedbygoogle.com to mourn its murderous ways. The Chocolate Factory sometimes kills products because they’re just bad and nobody uses them – hello, Wave – but on other occasions just decides they’re not needed any more, as was the case with the basic HTML version of Gmail. On at least one other occasion Google killed a product because it wanted users to start paying for it. In that case, users angrily pointed out that Google had promised the legacy version of its Workplace suite would always be free, and reversed its decision. Overall, however, Google has not often disrupted its business customers. AWS has been more inconvenient, launching multiple overlapping products and sometimes killing the least popular. Users of deprecated Google and A...