Sam Altman Opens Up About Sora Shutdown and Scrapping Disney's Billion-Dollar AI Partnership

Sam Altman Opens Up About Telling CEO of Disney That It Had All Been Smoke and Mirrors

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has finally dished on Disney's reaction to his decision to kill the company's AI video generator app, Sora -- scuttling a billion dollar deal the two giants had planned. Given the amount of money Disney was prepared to invest, and the suddenness of the decision, speculation abounded on the drama behind the scenes. But in an interview on the "Mostly Human" podcast -- the first he's given since the Sora news -- Altman insists that emotions were cool. When he broke the news to Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, the first thing he told Altman was, "I get it," Altman recalled. "But it's super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work," he said. Both companies sound cagey about burning bridges. AI, bubble or not, is too buzzy a market to shut the door on one of the industry's leading companies. And Disney's cultural clout is too influential to ignore. Altman, in the interview, left the door open to a future collab. "I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we're working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that," Altman said. "But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies." Disney, in response to the Sora shutdown, responded in lukewarm fashion, underscoring its continued openness to AI tech. "We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." OpenAI announced it was shuttering Sora in late March, something that reportedly came as a shock to Disney. Released only last September to considerable fanfare, it unleashed a storm of surreal AI creations like SpongeBob cooking meth, Altman grilling dead Pikachus, clips mocking dead celebrities, and spoof Pixar-style trailers featuring Jeffrey Epstein. And there was also the not-so-surreal: photorealistic depictions of people shoplifting, and other faked crimes, proliferated. The former raised significant concerns over potential copyright infringement, while the latter fueled discussions over the app being yet another source of effortless misinformation. Disney lent Sora some credibility when in December it signed a deal with OpenAI to license hundreds of its iconic characters from franchises like Star Wars and Marvel to be used in the AI video generator -- the first major licensing deal between OpenAI and a major Hollywood studio. The entertainment conglomerate also agreed to invest $1 billion into OpenAI and deploy its AI tech across the company. Now, with the plug being pulled on Sora, that $1 billion investment will not be going ahead, and Disney is no longer set to be a major OpenAI customer. That's a lot of money to be leaving on the table; Altman says he made the call to prioritize the precious computing power available to the company for other purposes. "It's always about compute," he said. Reporting, meanwhile, suggest OpenAI was losing a staggering $1 million per day on the video app. Altman made a plea for sympathy. "There are like many hard parts about being a CEO that you don't get sympathy for," he said in the podcast interview. "But one of them is, like, you have to, like, make a lot of, like, very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that because they're not the most important thing."

Altman reveals why Sora is coming to an end

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the shutdown of the Sora video app to avoid creating addictive engagement features that would have made it commercially viable. This statement was made during his first interview since the abrupt closure, which was conducted by journalist Laurie Segall for the Mostly Human podcast. OpenAI disclosed on March 24 that it would discontinue Sora, a short-form video generation tool launched in late 2024. This decision terminated a $1 billion partnership with Walt Disney Co., which had been announced in December and aimed to provide users licensed access to over 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters. Disney was notified about the closure less than an hour before the public announcement. A Disney spokesperson stated, "As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere." In the interview, Altman highlighted that Sora was losing users due to high operational costs, burning through approximately $1 million per day while its user base plummeted from one million to fewer than 500,000. The shutdown followed a jury verdict that found Meta and YouTube liable for creating harmful features, awarding $6 million in damages. This ruling raised ethical concerns regarding tech companies' responsibilities in preventing user addiction. Altman confirmed that OpenAI had rejected an internal proposal to integrate Sora's features into the ChatGPT platform. He stated that the closure aligns with OpenAI's strategic pivot towards focusing on coding tools and enterprise customers. Additionally, the research team from Sora will transition to developing world simulation models aimed at advancing robotics. The Sora app will be taken offline on April 26, with the developer API scheduled for shutdown on September 24.

Sam Altman Says OpenAI Is Still in Talks With Disney After Sora Shutdown

When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down Sora, the company's AI video generation tool, he called former Disney CEO Bob Iger to give him a heads up. Iger was the one who spearheaded the partnership, which would have given Sora access to hundreds of Disney characters, and with the entertainment company investing $1 billion in the AI giant. With OpenAI getting out of the video generation business, the Disney deal was toast before it even officially kicked off. "I get it," Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro told Altman, the OpenAI CEO recalled in his first interview after the decision was made. "It's super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work," Altman said. Altman spoke to journalist Laurie Segall for her new Mostly Human podcast, and while topics covered included the full spectrum of excitement and concerns around artificial intelligence, it is Sora and Disney that will likely be of most interest to Hollywood. And Altman left the door open to a future deal. "I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we're working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that," Altman said. "But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies." The decision was a close one, he said, mentioning that they had debated simply folding Sora into ChatGPT. "We were thinking about other versions of keeping it before the computer crunch came, we were talking about putting it into the ChatGPT app, really focusing on generation and creativity," Altman said. "But one thing that we had realized is that to succeed with it as the product was currently conceptualized in this way, you could watch a lot of videos, that would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn't want to make." Indeed, Altman framed the decision to shutter Sora as about prioritizing increasingly scarce resources: "It's always about compute," he said. "We have a few times in our history realized 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, this was the original thing happened with GPT3. We had a whole portfolio of bets at the time, a lot of them were working well. We shut down many projects that were working well, like robotics, so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing."