OpenAI Shuts Down Sora & United Wants More Premium Seating

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Morning Brew Daily 27 min 2 speakers 3 chapters transcribed 5 months ago
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Neil Freiman 0:01
Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, United's giving you more ways to lie down on a flight.
Toby Howell 0:09
Then, OpenAI's video generation platform Sora is dead as a doornail. It's Wednesday, March 25th. Let's ride.
Neil Freiman 0:21
Good morning. We got to tell you about this geography game that has completely taken over our office conversations and Slack channels.

Why is OpenAI shutting down Sora?

Neil Freiman 0:28
It's called MapTap, and each day you get five cities to locate on Earth, from Tulsa to Hanoi. It has a sharing mechanism, much like Wordle and all those other games that end in L-E. And yeah, it's just been a blast, and we wanted to recommend it. If you want your workplace to devolve into madness the way ours is, Toby, you'll find out where Monaco is one day.
Toby Howell 0:45
The desire to beat Neil, or at least not lose embarrassingly to Neil, has me learning geography at a faster clip than at any point in school. I think the magic of the game is that you just get the landmass. There's no borders. There's no cities labeled. There's no rivers highlighted. It's just the world, and you realize how much you use other countries to approximate the location of other countries. It's been very fun. I recommend bringing it to your group chats. You can play it at map.com. Tap.gg. Comment and email us your scores, too. I want to see if Neil is actually playing at such a high level or if maybe there's some more geography nerds out there.
Neil Freiman 1:23
And now a word from our sponsor, LinkedIn Ads. Toby, you are the best podcast co-host I know.
Toby Howell 1:28
Oh, Neil, you're making me blush. I thought you were going to tell me I'm the best map tap player, you know.
Neil Freiman 1:33
You'll get there someday, maybe. But do you know what else is the best LinkedIn ads is when it comes to generating the highest B2B ROAS of all online ad networks?
Toby Howell 1:42
They also have a network of over 1 billion professionals and 130 million decision makers.
Neil Freiman 1:46
You can target your buyers by job title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company revenue, so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience.
Toby Howell 1:54
Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Just go to linkedin.com slash mbd. That's linkedin.com slash mbd. Terms and conditions may apply. OpenAI's video generation platform came out of the gates soaring, but now it's no longer flying. Sora is officially dead, the casualty of a strategic pivot towards business and coding tools for OpenAI ahead of its potential IPO. Sora launched too much hoopla back in September as sort of a TikTok-style social feed for sharing AI content. You could input your own face into videos, which meant I was doing 360 dunks on Neil in no time. Sam Altman personally encouraged people to splice his face into videos, which led to a clip of him shoplifting becoming the first real viral content to come out of the platform.
Toby Howell 2:44
The move fast and break things approach meant that there were very few guardrails around protected content when Sora first launched, which set off a flurry of copyright battles. Eventually, though, they got the mouse on their side with Disney inking a $1 billion deal, which would let Sora use more than 200 of its characters, a deal that is now dead as Bambi's mom, given Sora's closure. Neil, I'd say for about two weeks or so, Sora was hot, rocketing up the App Store, pumping out viral clips, but users didn't stick around, and it turned into a money-sucking black hole for the company that is already burning through cash at an alarming rate.
Neil Freiman 3:19
You really have to stop spoiling movies, Toby. It's a bad habit. She dies, Neil. She dies. The main problem for Sora is that no one was using it, and it was insanely expensive to operate. It came out of the gate so fast. It reached a million downloads faster than ChatGPT, but then it had a huge punch. People really weren't using the social media platform. By January, downloads were down 45% according to TechCrunch. Meanwhile, video generation like this is so expensive, takes up so much compute for a company like OpenAI. Forbes estimated that OpenAI was perhaps blowing as much as $15 million per day.

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