When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down Sora, the company’s AI-driven video creation tool, he called former Disney CEO Bob Iger to give him a heads up.
It was Iger who led the partnership, which would have given Sora access to hundreds of Disney characters, and with the entertainment company investing $1 billion in the artificial intelligence giant. With OpenAI out of the video production business, the Disney deal was a success even before it officially began.
“I get it,” Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro told Altman, the OpenAI CEO recalled in his first interview after making the decision. “It’s always very sad to disappoint a partner, users or team, who are all doing a great job,” Altman said.
Altman spoke to journalist Laurie Segal about her new report Mostly human podcast, and while the topics covered included a whole range of excitement and concerns about AI, Sora and Disney are likely to be the ones Hollywood is most interested in.
Altman left the door open for a future deal.
“I love Sora, I love the videos that he’s made, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to create a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that,” Altman said. “But we need to focus our computing and product capacity on the next generation of robotics researchers and companies.”
He said the decision was close, noting that they simply discussed integrating Sora into ChatGPT.
“We were thinking about other versions to keep it before the computer crisis happened, and we were talking about putting it into a ChatGPT application, really focusing on generation and creativity,” Altman said. “But the one thing we realized was that to be successful in this product as the product was currently conceived in this way, you would watch a lot of videos, and that would have put a series of incentives on us, and that would have led to a set of decisions to win that we didn’t want to make.”
In fact, Altman framed the decision to shut down Sora as being about prioritizing increasingly scarce resources: “It’s always about compute.”
“We have realized several times in our history that something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects,” he added. “In fact, that was the original thing that happened with GPT3. We had a whole bunch of bets at the time, and a lot of them were working well. We shut down a lot of projects that were working well, like robotics, so that we could focus our computing and our researchers and our efforts on this thing.”
