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.
Most useless pile of jackshit to be ever created.
RIP Sgt General Jessica Foster. Semper fudge.
Could this mean less wholly AI generated videos on YouTube? Please be so.
People will just switch to using other tools like googles veo
Doesn’t that require a subscription though? It may not eliminate the slot videos, but that subscription is going to be a pretty substantial barrier to entry
Those pathetic AI youtube commercials where there is some fake over muscled geriatric talking about some miracle cure are the worst.
I just close them out. I’m hoping somewhere in youtubes algorithm of suck they are paying attention to how much those ads are hated.
Finally, a good news
It’s so they can repurpose that capacity for developing robots. It’s not good at all.
OpenAI told the BBC on Wednesday that it has discontinued Sora so that it can focus on other developments, such as robotics “that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks”.
Robots aren’t like software, it’s immediately obvious when they don’t work the way they’re advertised whereas chatbots can trick people into thinking they’re way more useful than they actually are. The “fake it till you make it” “move fast and break things” ethos of tech doesn’t work when there’s actual, physical evidence that shit’s busted.
Unpopular Opinion Incoming
I was assigned at work to evaluate a few LLMs for potential adoption, so I spent a solid week doing so.
Most of the “AI is broken and doesn’t work” on here is solid echo chamber cope. It’s more competent than several of my coworkers, though it’s thankfully not ready to replace knowledge workers as it requires a knowledge baseline to best direct it and evaluate its answers.
I still advised against using it for multiple reasons, including ethics, but much of Lemmy is playing make believe about the actual capabilities of LLMs.
Cool anecdote. Every time we actually see real data, though, the numbers don’t reflect much in the way of productivity gains or increased efficiency or better output. People say that LLMs are useful because it feels useful, but we aren’t seeing actual usefulness. The most recent study out of Duke University observes “a productivity paradox, in which perceived productivity gains are larger than measured productivity gains, likely reflecting a delay in revenue realizations.”
A delay. Sure.
I really appreciate your dismissive, arrogant tone. Your casual dismissing of my anecdote really added to how you provided even less substance to support your point.
But hey, it got you those “supporting the echo chamber by dunking on dissent” up votes, and that’s what we’re all here for, right?
Mind telling us what it is that you do? I heard similar things being said in the Plain English podcast last week (and the host was pretty anti-AI before) and I’m starting to wonder if certain jobs are going to be more affected than others.
Or are your coworkers just bad at what they do? :P When I was working tech support, there were people that were worse at their jobs than the bots of the time, let alone LLMs, I swear.
Electrical engineering. My mentioned coworkers are competent but more junior in the field. We did a miniature internal study and found the best models provided accurate, relevant information on the first prompt about 90% of the time when asked to explain or verify concepts. The remainder consisted of hallucinations or misunderstood queries.
They struggled with questions that instead required complex problem, providing some mixture of appropriate solutions, overly complex but still functional solutions, and hallucinated shite.
I recommended that we do not move forward with adopting AI in any capacity. While it has some utility for basic information retrieval and fact checking, it still required someone with sufficient knowledge to be able to quickly evaluate the quality of its output. Helpful for someone who knows what they’re doing, dangerous 10% if the time for someone who does not. I also highlighted the ethical concerns, many of which my peers were unaware.
Correct, thought there is still good news in a way: OpenAI is running out of money rapidly. So much so, that they have to pick and choose one thing over the other.
They would have done the robot thing anyways, but the fact that they had to shut something else down for it sbows that the massive deficit is starting to affect them pretty heavily.
Maybe im just coping, but imo, the cracks are getting bigger and bigger.
I think one of the reasons why consumer facing AI content is failing so bad is because we have had good video content for decades so it’s super obvious when a video is just off.
I think this relates to the main reason why AI is failing (or at least not popular with consumers). It automatically just means the product has less quality than you’ve been used to for your entire life. It hasn’t really provided anything new to consumers.
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.
Didn’t realise you could do it locally, just checked online and there’s several options. So why are these fuckers building huge, resource-greedy data centres. . ?
Because they want to do a lot of it and faster than a home pc could so they can offer it as a service.
What you can do locally is slower and with much smaller models.
So they can charge you to do it on your phone…
Sweet now do the whole company
I absolutely can’t wait for more of this shit to start collapsing financially.
Good.
As someone who named their daughter Sora in 2021, this is the best news I’ve gotten this year.
Congrats! 🥳🥳🥳
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.
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.
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.
Isn’t spending billions of dollars with nothing to show for it in the end the definition of a popping bubble?
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.
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?
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.
this 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.
escalator up, elevator down
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.
Openai is the canary
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
useful for propaganda videos thats what trump and other conservatives want to “trick people” that it is true whats being shown.
I think this might ignore something else video image generation is good for which is propaganda.
Fake or highly edited video of strikes in Iran, random video circulating online proporting 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.
You’re right. I should have specified “publicly accessable” image generation.
i heard sora uses around several MW of electricity just for a short 5-20second videos. extremely high cost.
Finger crossed, my friend! Fingers crossed.
Or 3 massive liability/ lawsuit /investigation about to be announced.
I think they intend to IPO this year and need to slow the hemorrhaging funds quickly to be more appealing to the stock market.
I guess. But shrinking the scope of their products doesnt exactly inspire the idea of infinite growth.
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.)
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.
. 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.
