cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44699253
This is clearly a sign that the product failed to draw in enough customers and its viability was overhyped.
Hopefully, it is the start of the AI bubble bursting.
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- Abyssian@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
So many people seem to have no idea what they’re talking about. This isn’t ending AI video creation, it just cost them a lot of money to offer it. You can generate a video on your own computer already. AI video isn’t going away because one company isn’t letting people do it on their servers for free any more.
- floppybiscuits@lemmy.worldEnglish50 minutes
Waiting for Ed zitron to repost this with this image attached 😂
- 2 minutes
I’d do this but its probably the wrong move. I tend to go with the steam method: do nothing while everyone else scrambles, profit.
- Griffus@lemmy.zipEnglish33 minutes
Or invest in non-US to keep them safe. Like Norwegian funds while the orange is oranging to gain on the oil price boom, and then spread out to European and emerging markets when he has his first public stroke in a few months.
- GreenShimada@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
It was used almost exclusively for slop and slop-based ads or videos that shouldn’t be slop. I was on there yesterday and some account had 2 videos of a woman in front of a plain wall talking for 15 seconds about tax implications for investments. A real human could have filed it with an iphone in 3 minutes.
But now that’s Google and Grok’s problems, I guess.
- 2 hours
If the audio and video is AI-generated I’m going to assume that the script is, too.
- piranhaconda@mander.xyzEnglish1 hour
I’ve had to do training at work that I’m fairly certain was mostly AI generated. The pics and audio seemed to be. And even the questions that I had to get right in order to complete the training… Some of them just weren’t covered in the training. Come on
- BlackLaZoR@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
Let me get this straight: Disney was supposed to give Openai license for their characters, and on top of that invest billion dollars in the Openai? The money literally went the wrong way
- IratePirate@feddit.orgEnglish8 hours
Not really. Disney management has drunken the same Koolaid as any other management right now: they believe they can fire large parts of their staff and replace them with “AI”, allowing them to achieve similar or even greater productivity at a fraction of the cost (i.e. whatever fee "open"AI charges). To achieve that, they need to give Sora access to their characters (so it can be trained to produce Disney movies) and invest in the company (as a down payment; money that would be recuperated by eliminating workers from the equation).
- 12 hours
you mean giving away billions of dollars of computer with no monetisation strategy was bad? man who would have thought. not sam, apparently. if only there were like, some way to have realised that the goal of business is to earn money
- AmblerTube@lemmy.worldEnglish18 hours
As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I’ve gotten this year.
- NekoKoneko@lemmy.worldEnglish22 hours
OpenAI said it will discontinue Sora, the generative-AI video creation platform it launched in late 2024, without providing a reason for the decision.
That is the strongest indication this is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble. Sora burned a ton of processing power, with no clear value proposition, just to keep the hype cycle going a little longer. Shutting down without explanation leaves the most likely one: they are out of helium to pump into the balloon. And if that balloon isn’t inflating, it’s deflating.
- kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
It’s not and probably the opposite.
When Sora launched it was way ahead. Seedance 2’s release was notably better than any of the other video gen models, Sora included.
The market is getting commoditized because there’s no moat and OpenAI hasn’t led on pretty much any release for a while now other than Sora, which they’re probably falling behind on now.
This is the opposite of a burst from a tech standpoint, even if OpenAI as a company starts to pop.
TL;DR: This is likely happening because the tech accelerated across the industry in ways OpenAI can’t catch back up to, not because it’s lagging.
- ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish4 hours
Isn’t spending billions of dollars with nothing to show for it in the end the definition of a popping bubble?
- yabbadabaddon@lemmy.zipEnglish3 hours
No, it’s called the basic business model for tech companies since years. Sadly.
A bubble popping would be when people start asking for their ROI or sell.
- NekoKoneko@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
Upvoted for a different perspective, but I suspect it ends in the same place.
OpenAI is kept solvent by investor capital, and capital is kept flowing by the perception of OpenAI being the market leader. Seedance being a better model, enough to cause OpenAI to exit the market, still ruptures the perception of value. In a market with no clear profitability path, that’s ground falling away.
It also can’t be simply commoditized because generations (I’m sure even Seedance) are expensive and still not good enough for production use, even if 50% of their consumer base might boycott if a major studio even did use it in production. Commoditization can’t occur when there’s still no economically self-sustaining, market-acceptable “good enough” product. Without that, even if the leader changes, it’s a race between lemmings (sorry) off the cliff.
- Kühlschrank@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
Yep - they briefly led in video gen but quickly were overtaken by other groups. There are even open source local models that perform really well now.
They could conceivably catch back up but how does that help them when their priority is chasing the AGI/ASI dragon?
4 hoursthis is the beginning of the end for the AI bubble
The end of the AI bubble has been beginning for years. The end of the beginning of the end of the bubble might take a few more years.
- klay1@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
i agree that AI is a bubble of trash but shutting off a part that wasn’t worth the cost is not an indication of an end. They just reduced cost to extend the financial runway. From my point of view text and coding were more popular anyway.
- CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish20 hours
It was a weak attempt to keep relevance when faced against Gemini and Claude. But it’s completely unnecessary now that OpenAI has contracted with the government. They get all that sweet tax payer money and get to repurpose a ton of GPUs making stupid videos to supporting that new gov contract.
Maybe you can only watch so many nonsense videos. I assume I’m sadly wrong though.
- 21 hours
Chime in if you disagreee, but there’s really only 2 reasons a company like OpenAI shuts down a core service like Sora:
- The service is hemorrhaging money to the point of financial unsustainability.
- The service is not popular enough to drive investor hype as a “loss leader”
We already know that OpenAI is losing money on their generative “AI” products across the board, to the tune of billions of dollars per year, and the economic woes that come from rising hardware prices, oil and gas shortages, and another pointless war in the middle east only make the situation worse for them money-wise.
And so that really just leaves me to conclude that Sora has not maintained the level of popularity and growth needed to impress investors as Q1 comes to a close. Whether it’s users, subscriptions, or time, they must have looked at the numbers and really didn’t like what they saw.
Hopefully this is the beginning of the end of the ridiculous “AI” bubble, and the start of a new tech sector correction.
- kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish6 hours
I suspect it’s that they got eclipsed by ByteDance with Seedance 2.0.
The video for that model is really good and makes Sora look pretty meh, and it may have been that current work on a next gen Sora wasn’t going to be competitive enough.
The worst thing a lab can do right now is look like they are falling behind (i.e. Meta), especially with OpenAI planning for an IPO.
So on top of the lackluster “social media” offering tied to Sora they decided to shutter the entire product line of video and pivot to enterprise (where they’ve already lost significant market share to Anthropic).
They’re in a pretty meh place at the moment overall tbh. I’m skeptical they’ll recover.
(But I wouldn’t mistake their fumbling for an industry wide shift on AI in general or even video AI.)
- halcyoncmdr@piefed.socialEnglish19 hours
There’s a third option this time.
It uses a lot of resources they can use immediately for the military contract that will now inevitably form the backbone of the company and effectively will mean they have won the AI war. Anthropic fumbled by not doing what the military wanted immediately, and showing a minimal backbone publicly.
- WindyRebel@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
I listened to a Vox’s Today Explained that tackled this whole contract. What was said on there was that Anthropic had in some very minor stipulations about AI and war, but were rejected. OpenAI came in with their offer and then after getting it, the contract they signed had the wording that Anthropic was asking for.
It basically came down to, Altman was the favorite of the Trump administration and got the contract because of behind the scenes bullshit and because Dario was/is super critical of Trump when it comes to AI safety.
- Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zipEnglish8 hours
In addition, marketing AI with image generation is a lot easier of a way to impress the public than the more technical applications, or the frightening prospect of the “security” applications, but image generation is only a good use of resources as advertisment, and the introductory phase is over.
- 7 hours
I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.
Fake of highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating on line proportinf that the Netanyahu hand videos, and random videos of Israeli strikes on Palestine (which I assume are to discredit actual video of the atrocities happening there), have been going viral for awhile now.
Advertising is probably one of the few industries that can use image generation and video generation via AI LLM in a way that would actually cut costs but the downside is people are increasingly militantly against ads and they are against AI generated content including ads, so this isn’t likely to become the reality any time soon.
If the McDonald’s ad and others like it had been better vetted for AI uncanny valley aspects and hallucinations that cause trucks to transform into short bus versions of themselves mid ad spot etc, the public might not have paid attention at all.
And lots of those same advertising firms are using AI to their benefit behind the scenes to purchase ad space. But using AI in ads in a public facing way is a dream out of reach for them for now because they bungled it so bad.
- Goferking0@ttrpg.networkEnglish18 hours
Or 3 massive liability/ lawsuit /investigation about to be announced.
- humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish19 hours
The market for professional video is fairly small, and most of the cost is in sales. ie. the advertising agency, or movie/show pitch that demands the producers get rich independent of production costs.
- worhui@lemmy.worldEnglish18 hours
. Ai companies want to replace all YouTube , and TikTok,creators with ai video content farms, capturing the creator market and if it scales the streaming market. Instead of getting a cut gen ai would let platforms eat the whole pie alone.
A significant number of smaller creators I watch have drastically increased the quality of animations and b roll by using ai tools.
These tool are a big deal to a big market.
