It makes total sense to me that this would happen. The economics around Sora and video generation in general are just not there right now, and if you're a company that's also doing research into these things, that's basically a bottomless pit for money. I think OpenAI ceding the space to Google and others for the moment is probably the smart move.

I had fun using Sora and I'm bummed to see it will get removed from the API as well later this year, but no biggie. Veo is plenty good.

It really must cost so much money to generate these videos. That they can generate 12 second videos that are high quality in such a short amount of time - that takes some serious horsepower.

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?"