OpenAI为什么要关掉Sora？

Today there's a pretty surprising piece of news.

OpenAI announced they're shutting down Sora.

Sora is that AI tool for making videos.

You type in a sentence, and it generates a video for you.

It was really popular before.

A lot of people used it.

But OpenAI said, we're done with it.

They said, we need to say goodbye to Sora.

After this news came out, a lot of people were shocked.

Because Sora had only been out for less than two years.

And when it first came out, everyone thought it was really incredible.

The videos it made were extremely realistic.

There were people, scenery, and animals.

It looked just like the real thing.

Later they released an upgraded version.

The video quality got even better.

They added sound.

The physics effects were also more realistic.

Like how water flows, how things fall down.

It all looked very natural.

They also made a phone app.

On the first day it became the most downloaded app.

So Sora was actually a very successful product.

So why shut it down?

The main reason is not enough resources.

Making videos requires a huge amount of computing chips.

These chips are expensive, and they're hard to get.

Before this, OpenAI had already limited how many videos users could make.

Because there weren't enough chips.

They thought, if these chips were used for other things instead.

Like making code, doing reasoning, generating text.

Those things make more money.

And have a better future.

There's another reason too, which is competition.

OpenAI's biggest competitor right now is Anthropic.

Anthropic made an AI called Claude.

It performs really well at writing code and generating text.

A lot of companies and engineers are using it.

Anthropic's strategy is simple.

They don't make images, they don't make videos.

They only focus on text and code.

So they can put all their resources where it matters most.

OpenAI saw this trend.

And also decided to focus their efforts on the most profitable things.

Sora also had some other problems.

Like copyright issues.

A lot of users used Sora to make videos of movie characters.

Like Mario, Pikachu, and Lara Croft.

These characters are copyrighted.

Some people also used it to make fake videos.

All of this caused trouble for OpenAI.

Also, Disney had previously invested one billion dollars to partner with OpenAI.

They wanted to use Disney characters to make videos.

But now Sora is shut down.

So that partnership is gone too.

Disney said they respect this decision.

But the thing about one billion dollars.

It's definitely not that simple to just let it go.

OpenAI's current valuation is about 730 billion dollars.

They just recently raised 110 billion in funding.

So they have money.

But they need to spend money where it's most worthwhile.

Making videos isn't the most worthwhile.

Making code and reasoning is.

So Sora is shut down just like that.

If you've used Sora, you should hurry and save your videos.

Because they'll be gone later.