Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced to shut down its Sora video platform last week. The platform was announced in September 2025 and is being discontinued in less than a year. Days later, the company CEO has shared views on the decision to shut down Sora.
Speaking on the tech podcast Mostly Human, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told host Laurie Segall: ‘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. In fact, this was the original thing that happened with GPT3.”For those unaware, The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI signed an agreement for Disney in December last year, becoming “the first major content licensing partner on Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform”. When pressed about the decision to shut down Sora coming months after OpenAI’s partnership with Disney, Altman said: “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.
But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generations of automated researchers and companies.”Continuing further, he said: “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 which we mentioned, so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing that we said ‘okay there’s a very important thing happening’,”.
During the podcast, Altman further said that he did “not expect 3 or 6 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.”During the podcast, Segall asked Sam Altman if he personally called Bob Iger, former CEO of Disney. The OpenAI CEO replied in affirmative saying “Disney is an amazing company. The very first thing that the new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro said to me was like, “Hey,” you know, he’s like, “I get it.”Adding further, he said “It’s super sad to disappoint a partner or users or a team all of which are doing incredible work and the I mean there are like many hard parts about being a CEO that you don’t get sympathy for”.
