OpenAI officially pulled the plug on its high-profile video platform, Sora last week – less than a year after its launch. The shutdown was due to a growing crisis facing the world’s most powerful AI companies: a critical shortage of computing power.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI scrapped its Sora, which included a consumer app, a developer version, and video tools within ChatGPT, in part to free up computing resources to power coding and enterprise products that would work on a new AI model, code-named Spud.Behind every AI-generated video is a massive array of specialised chips (GPUs) that are increasingly in short supply. OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, recently admitted that the company is constantly hunting for “any last-minute compute available”, the report said.“We’re making some very tough trades at the moment on things we’re not pursuing because we don’t have enough compute,” Friar said in a recent interview (via The Wall Street Journal). These “trades” mean sacrificing video generation to fuel the massive surge in business and coding tasks.
OpenAI’s Sora by the numbers
OpenAI launched Sora video platform in September last year and it grew over subsequent months. This can be understood by the fact that token use (the way AI processes information) jumped from 6 billion per minute in October to 15 billion per minute in late March.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is moving away from a “launch-everything” strategy, which executives now refer to as “side quests.” Instead, the company is consolidating its most successful tools – ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent, and the Atlas browser – into a single desktop “Superapp.”Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, noted that the previous fragmentation was “slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.”
The goal now is to build “agentic” AI.The shutdown of Sora also marked the end of a high-stakes partnership. In December, Disney had announced a $1 billion investment tied to Sora, which would have allowed users to legally create videos featuring iconic characters like Luke Skywalker and Woody from Toy Story.
