The economics work if you generate the video locally, using your own compute and a pretrained model provided for a fee. The compute bit is the expensive part. Local users could trade time for money. They just don't have a business or security model that allows them to distribute the model for people to use locally. Sure, you might need to wait all night for 10 seconds of video generated on your 4090, but you could do it, and folks might even pay for the privilege of using the pretrained model. Licensing for local compute might even pay back the cost of training the model with enough time and users.

This is the model that makes sense to me and I'm surprised nobody at OpenAI pursued it. Yeah a 4090 would take hours for 10 seconds of video, but people already do this. The SD/ComfyUI crowd runs overnight batch generations on consumer GPUs and doesn't care about latency.

Charge for model access, let users burn their own power. Basically Llama but for video (pun intended).

The reason it won't come from OpenAI is the deepfake thing. Distribute the weights and you lose all moderation. Sora already had a deepfake disaster WITH server-side controls. Without any? Good luck.

But yeah, for someone willing to go open-weights, there's a real business there.Opus 4.6Étendue