Six months after releasing the Sora app and seeing it go viral, OpenAI is discontinuing its service, the company announced Tuesday.
“We say goodbye to Sora. We thank everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built a community around it,” OpenAI wrote in the X post. “What you create with Sora matters, and we know this news is disappointing. We’ll be sharing more details soon, including a timeline for our apps and APIs, and details about preserving your work.”
Sora has been hugely popular among users, reaching 1 million downloads in less than five days after its launch in late September, but OpenAI is racking up costs as it tries to justify its $730 billion valuation and prepare for a possible IPO. OpenAI is backing away from big spending plans, shelving some ambitious projects, and embracing its role as a buyer of large amounts of cloud capacity rather than a builder of giant data centers.
Earlier on Tuesday, OpenAI announced it was pivoting away from the instant checkout shopping feature it announced last year. The company also announced plans earlier this month to combine its web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a single desktop super app.
Sora allowed users to generate short videos, remix videos created by other users, and post them to a shared feed. suddenly rose to the top apple’s App Store, but the initial excitement among users has since dissipated.
Disney announced in December that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI to enable users to create videos with copyrighted characters on Sora. But the deal was never finalized.
A Disney spokesperson said Tuesday that the company respects “OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and shift its priorities to other areas.”
“We are grateful for the constructive collaboration between our teams and the learnings we have learned, and we will continue to engage with our AI platform to find new ways to meet fans where they are, while responsibly embracing new technology that respects the rights of IP and creators,” Disney said in a statement.
Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications at OpenAI, recently held an all-hands meeting with his staff to discuss the company’s priorities. He said OpenAI is “aggressively oriented” toward productive use cases. One area where the company is trying to compete more strongly is in the enterprise space, where Anthropic has built a large business with its Claude model.
“What’s really important for us right now is to stay focused and execute very well,” Simo said during the meeting, according to a partial transcript seen by CNBC.
—CNBC’s Stephen Desaulniers contributed to this report.
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