Why OpenAI shut down Sora
We’ve just experienced our first AI product shutdown and it’s quite a big one. OpenAI just closed up Sora, their TikTok-like app designed to allow for quick and easy video generation for the consumer and prosumer markets. The app, OpenAI’s first standalone app after ChatGPT, shot to the top of the iPhone App Store soon after its September launch and saw about three million users. That rise brought scrutiny just as fast. Copyright holders questioned how their work was being used. Others pointed to the use of people’s likenesses without clear guardrails. Critics also argued the app was adding to a growing wave of low quality, synthetic content that muddies the line between real and fake. Disney pledged a billion dollars to the service to provide characters and likenesses that users could remix into their own work. That deal, according The Hollywood Reporter, is now off. What’s OpenAI’s official position? “As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” said an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. Basically they found out that video was too hard and fraught with potential copyright landmines. An Artist’s ViewAli Powell runs Animeta AI Media, a studio focused on AI driven video production and experimentation. He has tested most of the major tools in the space, and his view of OpenAI’s Sora is blunt. In his experience, the product has not kept pace with how creators actually work.  “OpenAI has always been a janky company that starts the train while the track is still being built, so it fits their MO,” he said. “I really think it has more to do with their DoD deal. Sora’s main strength is being able to take 30 seconds of video and make clean clones of people you can reuse over and over, not to mention generating people from scratch.” He also points to a shift in priorities inside OpenAI itself. “I think it’s because they lost a lot of their users and it was fading as a social platform,” he said. Powell’s broader argument is that the center of gravity may be moving away from consumer tools and toward institutional buyers. With governments putting real money into AI systems, he suspects companies like OpenAI are starting to optimize for those relationships rather than for everyday creators. “Given how much governments are investing in AI right now, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re selling this tech directly at that level,” he said. “If that’s the case, the need to polish a consumer product drops. That’s my conspiracy theory.” At the same time, he is dismissive of the idea that problems with Sora signal a wider collapse in AI video. “What’s funny about the Sora situation is you’ve got people cheering like the whole AI video space is falling apart,” he said. “But nobody serious was using Sora to make films. It was mostly people making memes or testing ideas.” For Powell, the demand side has not changed. If anything, it is getting stronger. “This isn’t going anywhere,” he said. “Most younger audiences don’t care about the ethics debate. They care about whether something is interesting enough to watch. If the tools can deliver that, people will use them.” His view reflects a split that is becoming more visible in the space. The tools are uneven and often frustrating, but the direction is clear. Creators are not waiting for perfect systems and instead they are working with what exists, stitching together workflows, and pushing the outputs into real projects. In that context, Sora’s limitations matter less than the broader shift toward faster, cheaper, and more flexible video production. The Tooling IssueTo get a behind the scenes look I spoke to Addvenute Executive Vice President Scott Maiocchi. Scott’s role has been to implement AI video into his company’s preproduction systems. “What I’m trying to do is develop the stack of intelligence workflow and governance,” he said. He’s followed the Sora story with interest. When Sora first appeared, he said, it landed at the right moment. Image generation had already gone mainstream through tools like Midjourney, and video felt like the next step. Early reactions reflected that sense of anticipation. “I think when Sora first came out, it was really one of the first ones out there,” he said. “In video content creation, you’re always excited about a new tool because imagery had been out there for quite a while.” Then there was the familiar Silicon Valley pattern: big claims, unclear mechanics, and a sense that something powerful was happening inside a system that few people fully understood. “Companies claim it can do a bunch of different things and it’s kind of like this black box of magic,” he said. “So there was a lot of potential, I think. Trying it, I thought it was pretty good. It was kind of interesting, especially if you’re going to do a one-off.” The problem is that video is not a collection of isolated clips. It is a system of constraints. Lighting, composition, lens choice, continuity, all of it has to line up. That is where tools like Sora still struggle. “With video especially, it’s very hard to control all the variables as a director,” he said. “If I’m doing a real piece, I want control over lighting, composition, shot selection, lens selection. Getting a one-off shot was always good with Sora,” he said. “But if you’re trying to make a cohesive piece or build a story, it would probably take more time to get it right than just shooting it.” That tradeoff pushes the tool into a narrow role. Useful, but not central, which made Sora a novelty and not a real tool. Further, OpenAI couldn’t keep up with competitors. “There’s new services out there, like Martini, that are more workflow based, which are better,” he said. What surprised Maiocchi was not the technical limitation, but the apparent pullback. For him, the explanation is less about failure and more about priorities. “I just think it’s probably a shift in business priorities,” he said. “If they’re moving toward an enterprise model, like Anthropic, there’s a lot more money there.” Video, by contrast, is expensive. It consumes compute, and it does not yet offer the same return. “There’s fighting for compute,” he said. “It’s probably bogging down what they could do, and there’s not a lot of return.” More broadly, he sees an industry that is still unstable at the top. “With any AI company, things change on a dime,” he said. “What a model did great yesterday, it doesn’t do great now, and someone else does something better.” That dynamic is shaping how companies position themselves. Some are chasing enterprise contracts. Some are pushing consumer tools. Some are trying to own the entire stack. Sora wasn’t part of OpenAI’s strategy. What’s Next for AI Video?Sora’s shutdown is less an ending than a signal about where the real constraints and incentives in this space sit. Video generation remains expensive, difficult to control, and exposed to legal risk, while the strongest revenue opportunities are increasingly tied to enterprise and government use rather than consumer facing tools. None of that, however, changes the broader trajectory. Creators are still building with these systems, often stitching together multiple tools to get usable results, and the pace of iteration continues to accelerate even as individual products come and go. What Sora represented was not a finished solution but an early attempt to collapse production timelines and widen access to video creation, and that underlying goal has not gone away. If anything, its disappearance clarifies what the next phase requires. Tools will need to fit into real production workflows, offer directors meaningful control over variables that define a scene, and connect directly to outcomes that matter for businesses rather than just outputs that look impressive in isolation. Generating a clip is easy to demonstrate, but building something cohesive and watchable remains the harder problem. In that sense, Sora’s role was transitional. It proved demand, exposed technical and economic limits, and pushed the concept forward. According to the experts I spoke to, the next generation of tools will be judged less by novelty and more by whether they can hold together under the pressure of real use.
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Keep Going: Stop numbing yourself and start paying attention
“When you're going through hell, keep going." This podcast is about failure and how it breeds success. Every week, we talk to remarkable people who have accomplished great things but have also faced failure along the way. By exploring their experiences, we can learn how to build, succeed, and stay humble. The podcast is hosted by author and former TechCrunch and New York Times journalist John Biggs.
He also hosts The Innovators, a podcast focused on brand new startups and C-Level Executives and Creators.
If you’d like to appear on either show, email john@biggs.cc.
Our theme music is by Policy, AKA Mark Buchwald. (https://freemusicarchive.org/music/policy/)
Keep Going: Stop numbing yourself and start paying attention
I sat down with Anne Karber and what struck me right away was not the résumé. Entrepreneur, author, podcast host, all of that is fine, but it is not the story. The story is what happens when you build a life that works on paper and still feels wrong when you wake up in it.
She came up in construction, which is not a forgiving place. Long hours, constant pressure, and a culture that rewards output above everything else. She learned to operate in that mode early. Work harder than everyone else. Push through anything. Do not stop to think about how you feel because that slows you down. That approach got her success in the way most people define it. Money, stability, control. But it also trained her to ignore anything that did not fit into that system.
Then her sister died, suddenly and without warning, and that kind of loss does not fit into a system built on control. It breaks it. What followed was not some dramatic collapse. It was something more common and more dangerous. She kept going, but she started numbing herself to get through it. Work during the day, drinking at night, and repeating that cycle until it became normal. Not chaos, just a steady flattening of everything that mattered.
She described it in a way that is hard to ignore. You are not living your life at that point, you are anesthetizing it. You remove the parts that hurt, but you also remove the parts that make anything feel real. The problem is that it works, at least for a while. That is why people stay there.
What changed for her was not some sudden moment of clarity. It was exhaustion with the pattern. She got to a place where she could not look at herself and feel any sense of pride. That is a low bar, but it is a real one. When you cross that line, something has to give.
She went to rehab. She doubled down on therapy. She started doing things that sound simple and are anything but simple when you are used to avoiding yourself. Writing things down. Sitting without distractions. Paying attention to where her time and energy were actually going. Not where she thought they were going, but where they really went when she looked at it honestly.
One of the sharper points she made is that energy is the only resource that really matters. Everyone talks about time, but time is not the issue. Energy is. You can spend hours doing something and feel fine, or you can spend twenty minutes on something that drains you completely. Most people never track that. They just move from one habit to another and assume it is all the same.
She started treating energy like something that had to be accounted for. What gives it back. What takes it away. What is neutral. Once you see that clearly, you start to realize how much of your life is built around habits that do nothing for you. Endless scrolling. Drinking. Overworking. All of it framed as necessary, but none of it actually helping.
There is a hard part here that she did not soften. You have to be honest about what you are doing. Not in a vague way, but in a direct way. If you spend three hours a day on your phone, you write that down. If you drink every night, you admit what that is doing, not what you tell yourself it is doing. Most people avoid that step because it is uncomfortable, but without it nothing changes.
She also pushed back on the idea that people do not have time to fix any of this. That excuse falls apart the second you look at how your day is actually spent. There is time, it is just not being used well. That is not a moral judgment, it is just a fact.
What I found interesting is that she did not replace one extreme with another. She still works. She still builds things. The difference is that it is not coming from the same place. Before, work was part of the numbing. Now it is something she chooses with intent. That sounds small, but it changes everything.
There is also a broader point here about how people define success. She followed the standard path for decades. The house, the cars, the outward signs that you have made it. When she got there, it did not deliver what it promised. That is not a new story, but it is one that people keep ignoring because the alternative requires more thought and more responsibility.
The question she kept coming back to is simple and uncomfortable. What are you using to avoid your own life. Not what are you doing to relax, not what are you doing to unwind, but what are you using to not feel what is actually going on. If you answer that honestly, you start to see the structure you are living in.
Most people sense that something is off at some point. They have that moment where they think there has to be more than this. The usual move is to ignore it and keep going. What Anne did was stop and follow that thought instead of pushing it away.
There is nothing clean or easy about that process. It is slow and it forces you to deal with things you have been avoiding for years. But the alternative is to stay in a loop that never changes.
The takeaway is not some neat system or set of rules. It is more basic than that. Pay attention to what you are doing. Be honest about why you are doing it. Then start making changes, even small ones, based on what you see. Most people never get past the first step.
She did, and that is the whole difference.
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