OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is closure Sora, a TikTok-like social app launched six months ago. OpenAI did not give a reason for the shutdown, nor did it share information on when it will officially be discontinued.
When Sora first launched as an invite-only social network, it seemed like everyone was clamoring for an invite. But like Meta’s Horizon Worlds — the company’s social VR platform — which is also in turmoil despite once being central to the company’s infamous metaverse, Sora has had no real staying power. While Sora 2’s underlying video and audio production model is terrifyingly impressive, there hasn’t been sustained interest in an AI-only social stream.
Sora was meant to act like an AI-first TikTok, cloning the recognizable vertical video streaming interface. Its flagship feature, “cameos,” allowed people to scan their faces and make realistic deepfakes of themselves. These cameos could be made public, allowing anyone to make a video of their cameo. (Cameo took OpenAI to court over the name of this feature and prevailed, forcing the company to change it to “characters”.)
In a series of events that surprised literally no one, this glorified deepfake app was weird.
At launch, Sora felt like a controlled minefield of creepy Sam Altman videos. I’ll never be the same after watching a lifelike clone of OpenAI’s CEO walk through a fattened pig slaughterhouse and ask, “Are my piggies enjoying their berry?”
Sora wasn’t supposed to allow people to make videos of public figures they didn’t explicitly choose, but it was very easy to bypass OpenAI’s guardrails. Sure enough, fake real faces emerged, including civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and actor Robin Williams, prompting both of their daughters to take to Instagram and ask users to stop making videos of their dead fathers.
After making dozens of videos of Sam Altman stealing Nvidia chips from a Target, users shifted gears. Instead, they deliberately created content using copyrighted characters, causing legal trouble for the man they loved to deepfake – we saw Mario smoking weed, Naruto ordering Krabby Patties and Pikachu doing ASMR.
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This did not go as planned. Instead of suing, Disney, a notoriously litigious company, gave OpenAI one $1 billion investment and a licensing deal that would allow Sora to create videos featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
It felt like a watershed moment for the AI industry. But with Sora gone, so is the deal – though mostly, it looks like no money actually changed hands before it collapsed. (Disney had some kind words about the whole thing on Tuesday, telling The Hollywood Reporter that it would “continue to engage in artificial intelligence platforms“moving on.)
The initial hype around Sora was real. The app peaked in November with about 3,332,200 downloads on the iOS App Store and Google Play, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Appfigures. If the app had continued to be developed, then maybe OpenAI would have continued it, but it didn’t. By February, it was down to 1,128,700 downloads. That seems like a big number, until you remember that ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users.
Over its lifetime, Appfigures estimates that Sora earned about $2.1 million from in-app purchases, which allowed users to purchase more video production credits. It’s hard to imagine that the computing demands of the Sora app tipped the scales so much for a company that already they operate at massive damagebut the app was probably too big to keep if it wasn’t even growing.
When OpenAI released the Sora app, I was ready for a world where we could have the tools to deepfake each other at our fingertips. Although I rarely make TikToks, I felt compelled to do so post a PSA that this terrifying technology was coming fast. It ended up getting over 300,000 views, which is not the norm for my often-idle TikTok account, but this news got a real reaction from people. I never expected it to last only six months.
But just because Sora left doesn’t mean the threat went with her. The Sora 2 model is still available — it’s just hidden behind ChatGPT’s paywall. And OpenAI isn’t alone in making this technology so accessible. It’s only a matter of time before the next social AI video app hits the market and we’re inundated with another tsunami of clips where Snowstorm storms the Capitol.
