OpenAI announced Tuesday that it is shutting down Sora, a TikTok-like social app that was released six months ago. OpenAI did not provide a reason for the closure or share information on when it would be officially retired.
When Sora first opened as an invite-only social network, it seemed like everyone wanted an invite. But like Meta’s Horizon Worlds, the company’s virtual reality social platform, it too has fallen into turmoil, despite once being the center of the company’s infamous Metaverse. Sora had no real staying power. Sora 2’s underlying video and audio generation model is frighteningly impressive, but the AI-only social feed lacked sustained interest.
Sora was meant to function like an AI-first TikTok, replicating a recognizable vertical video feed interface. Its flagship feature, “Cameo,” allowed people to scan their own faces to create realistic deepfakes of themselves. These “cameos” can be made public and anyone can create their own “cameo” video. (Cameo sued OpenAI over the feature’s name and won, forcing the company to change it to “Characters.”)
In a turn of events that literally surprised no one, this glorified deepfake app was just plain weird.
At launch, Sora felt like a poorly managed minefield of creepy Sam Altman videos. I’ll never be the same after seeing a realistic clone of the OpenAI CEO walk around a fattening pig slaughterhouse and ask, “Are my pigs having fun?”
Sora wasn’t supposed to allow you to generate videos of celebrities who didn’t explicitly opt in, but it was very easy to get around OpenAI’s guardrails. Sure enough, deepfakes of real people like civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and actor Robin Williams emerged, and the two daughters took to Instagram to urge users to stop making videos of their late fathers.
After Sam Altman produced dozens of videos of him stealing Nvidia chips from targets, users switched gears. Instead, they intentionally created content using copyrighted characters, inviting legal trouble for the beloved men who made the deepfakes. Mario was seen smoking marijuana, Naruto ordering a Krabby Patty, and Pikachu doing ASMR.
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This didn’t go as planned. Rather than sue, Disney, a notoriously litigious company, invested $1 billion in OpenAI and signed a licensing agreement that would allow Sola to generate videos featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.
It seemed like a breakthrough moment for the AI industry. But with Sora gone, so is the deal. Notably, however, there appears to have been no actual exchange of funds prior to the collapse. (Disney had some polite words on the whole matter Tuesday, telling The Hollywood Reporter that it “continues to engage with AI platforms” going forward.)
The initial hype about Sora was real. The app peaked in November with about 3,332,200 downloads across the iOS App Store and Google Play, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Appfigures. If the app had continued to grow, OpenAI probably would have kept it going, but that wasn’t the case. In February, it dropped to 1,128,700 downloads. This seems like a big number until you remember that ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users.
Appfigures estimates that Sora earned approximately $2.1 million in in-app purchases during its lifetime, allowing users to purchase more video generation credits. It’s hard to imagine that the Sora app’s computing demands would have shifted that much for a company already running huge losses, but it may have been too much of a burden to keep using the app when it wasn’t even growing.
When OpenAI released the Sora app, I prepared the world for a world with tools to easily create deepfakes of each other. I don’t often make TikToks, but I felt obligated to post a PSA about the rapid emergence of this scary technology. It ended up getting over 300,000 views, which is unusual for my frequently dormant TikTok account, but the news sparked a huge response from people. I never thought it would last only six months.
But just because Sora is gone doesn’t mean the threat is gone. Sora 2 models are still available. It’s just hidden behind a ChatGPT paywall. And OpenAI is not alone in making this technology so accessible. It’s only a matter of time until the next social AI video app hits the market, and the tsunami of clips of Snow White storming the Capitol hits again.
