The sudden fall of Sora

I think the only logical conclusion is that many of these tech leaders are liars or have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Maybe somewhere in between.

On here and else where there are people who see AI for what it is and are absolutely blown away by it and defend these people without realizing that they are regularly promising something much more to investors that can never be fulfilled. The idea that LLMs can ever reach any sense of true AGI is delusional.

If anything, Sora was an experimental question: giving away video generation is expensive, but is the voluntary user labeling and engagement data, which can be fed into RLHF, accretive enough to model training that it's a meaningful trade to make?

The shutdown of the service makes it clear that the answer was "no."

(It's not a particularly useful signal, though, in evaluating OpenAI's future. It could mean that OpenAI is less interested in video data, which might have implications on their AGI ambitions. It could equally mean that OpenAI has enough data that it's hit diminishing returns, or has found a cheaper source of labeling, or doesn't consider it meaningful one way or another. So there's a lot of thoughtpieces that the shutdown is a sign of weakness, but I don't think it's worth jumping to conclusions.)

I'm actually very surprised, even if it was costing money. Their technological moat has turned out to be much more shallow than expected and competition fiercer. At the moment I think their greatest asset is brand and engagement. With a popular product and a deal with Disney seemed like a slam dunk on remaining prominent in the brand space and retaining user engagement.

Not only have they thrown out a name everyone knew, and exited the market segment, but they've also triggered Netflix/Google graveyard woes. "We may not maintain products you like". This could make people wary of buying into new products, "will it be there in a year?"

A gift for us?! TY

Yes, that is what hype is. It was organic hype, and is frankly the only real way to do it otherwise you get backlash.

> It took off rapidly but that was hardly because of any hyping and almost entirely due to word of mouth and people actually liking the product, until the press picked up on it.

Not my experience. A whole lot of breathless mentions in media, LinkedIn, and especially top-down company emails. Far fewer cases of people actually liking/using it.

It was claimed that ChatGPT was sentient and AGI lol

Some people lost their minds over the popular sentiment: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-...

ChatGPT is one of the most hyped tech products ever. We’ve had nearly 4 years of hype. From claims of AGI to claims we need UBI because of the ways it will devastate the work force.

OpenAI were completely taken by surprise by the success of ChatGPT. Internally there were debates over whether they should launch it at all.

It's had a ton of hype since then of course.

I think the way Sam Altman talked about AI. The framing of it. That they had to hold back the real version because it is just too powerful; they don't even know how it is working; it is already doing these incredible things that would change the world, but we can't / won't release it was all cleverly orchestrated.

We will notice once they fall silent too.

Just wait until Sir Jony Ive's unapologetically AI hardware products that cost too much, do too little, and also flop.

It's a business for all the spin doctors who make money with creative marketing to keep the hype going. Everyone with the ability to sell hot air has an opportunity to get rich right now.

They’re slowly deprecating and ending the Sora API over the next 6 months.

A systemic risk to the financial sector due to their overexposure to CDOs? Yes, I know that's the same plot as 2008. The writers have gotten lazy.

Eventually a new era of maturity and cost discipline.

First thing that comes to mind is musk will be absolutely insufferable and childish about it. A lot of companies will be impacted but it’s not going to happen. They are cleaning up their messes to go public

I'm not an expert, but I can't see how they truly go under in the way Enron or Theranos did. If they did hit massive financial trouble the issue wouldn't be that their technology was bad, it would just be that they didn't have enough runway to get to a point where they could make the tech profitable. Someone with deep pockets would step in an buy them up before they went to 0 under the belief that they could last long enough to make the math work. Microsoft has a huge vested interest in keeping them solvent since they own so much of it already. Amazon clearly wants in after this last round of funding. I also wouldn't be surprised if Musk tried to buy it given that xAI seems like a bit of a shit show and I can't think of a better way for him to assert dominance over Altman than to take a company that Altman almost bankrupted and make it successful.

Anthropic takes the lead, hopefully.

Investors immediately lose confidence in the entire space. Anyone who doesn't have other revenue streams -- e.g. Google, Apple, Microsoft, X -- probably goes under or sells shortly thereafter. the aforementioned big tech companies pull back investment considerably because shareholders no longer want to see investment in AI because they see it as a waste of capital resources that could be spent on things that actually make money. They go for the simplest lowest cost implementations and largely abandon advancements. Billions if not trillions of dollars in data center plans and hardware purchases are cancelled causing significant pain in the hardware sector. Hardware manufactures try to pivot to the next thing, but it will be multi year slow process to pivot.

That's not what's happening. Disney were due to invest $1bn in OpenAI to partner on Sora and that deal has been cancelled.