Late last month, Disney ended its partnership with OpenAI when Sora was shut down. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shut down Sora, he reached out to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and current CEO Josh D’Amaro, who said, “I get it.” Altman shared about the experience on Laurie Segall’s Mostly Human podcast. “It’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work,” Altman said.
While Sora is closed, OpenAI might not be completely out of the AI video generation business. “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,” Altman said. “But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.”
The decision to ultimately close Sora was a difficult one. At one point, it was discussed that Sora could be folded into ChatGPT. “We were thinking about other versions of keeping it before the computer crunch came, we were talking about putting it into the ChatGPT app, really focusing on generation and creativity,” Altman said. “But one thing that we had realized is that to succeed with it as the product was currently conceptualized in this way, you could watch a lot of videos, that would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn’t want to make.”
At the end of the day, Altman said, “It’s always about compute.” The company had to prioritize resources that were becoming increasingly scarce.
“We have a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects,” he added. “In fact, this was the original thing happened with GPT3. We had a whole portfolio of bets at the time, a lot of them were working well. We shut down many projects that were working well, like robotics, so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing.”
What does this mean for the future of Disney’s user-generated AI videos in the future? At this point, it is unknown. Previously, Disney had said it wanted to allow users to utilize Sora to create videos, some of which could end up on Disney+. It isn’t known if Disney is now looking for another company to partner with to make this happen or if it is giving up on this idea. Daps Magic will continue to follow this story and provide updates as they become available.
What do you think of Disney potentially working with OpenAI in the future? Do you think there is a future there? What do you think it should be? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments below!
