Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?

What signals have you seen that point to investment being predicated around AGI? Boosting Nvidia stock prices could also be explained by an expectation of increased inference usage by office workers which increases demands for GPUs and justifies datacenter buildouts. That's a much more "sober" outlook than AGI.

In fact a fun thing to think about is what signals we could observe in markets that specifically call out AGI as the expectation as opposed to simple bullish outlook on inference usage.

I think the motivation for someone like Altman is not AGI, it's power and influence. And when he wields billions he has power, it doesn't really matter if there's AGI coming.

We were promised AGI and all we are getting is Bob Ross coloring on the walls of a Target store.

The app is fun to use for about 10 minutes then that is it.

Same goes for Grok imagine. All people want to do is generate NSFW content.

What happened to improving the world?

What was predicted to be next: AGI

What we got next: porn

AGI is like L5 automated driving - academic concepts that have no bearing on the ability of these technologies to transform the economy.

There are also interesting things one could do with models like Sora, depending how it actually performs in practice: prompting to segment, for example; and the thing could very possibly, if it's fast enough etc. become a foundation for robotics.

I don't think that's fair.

ChatGPT clearly is "for consumers". Whereas Sora is a kind of enshitification to monetize engagement. It's right to question the latter.

I agree. My bet is that OpenAI will not fullfill its mission of developing AGI by 2035. And I would be surprised if they ever did. As much as they might want to, there is only so many dreams you can whisper into rich people's ears before they tell you to go away. And without rich people's money, OpenAI will fall like a house of cards. The wealthy won't have infinite patience

On some level they know that LLMs alone won't lead to AGI so they have to take a shotgun approach to diversify, and also because integrating some parts of all these paths is more likely to lead to the outcome they want than going all in on one.

Also because they have the funding to do it.

Reminds me a bit of the early Google days, Microsoft, Xerox, etc,

This is just what the teenage stage of the top tech startup/company in an important new category looks like.

The massive cost of this product is unique though (not even counting the copyright lawsuits/settlements coming). I can't think of any side projects that require this level of investment.

> It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them.

Anthropic has said that every model they've trained has been profitable. Just not profitable enough to pay to train the next model.

I bet that's true for OpenAI's LLMs too, or would be if they reduced their free tier limits.

It's to their benefit to try everything right now. And quickly.

> OpenAI is making a wild number of product plays at once

It's similar to the process of electrification. Every existing machine/process needed to be evaluated to see if electricity would improve it: dish washing, clothes drying, food mixing, etc.

OpenAI is not alone. Every one of their products has an (sometimes superior) equivalent from Google (e.g. Veo for Sora) and other competitors.

>It seems true that no company has used frontier models to create a product with business value commensurate with the cost it takes to train and run them. That what OpenAI is trying to do with Sora, and with Codex, Apps, "Agent" flows, etc. I don't think there's more to read into it than that.

It makes them look desperate though. Nothing like starting tons of services at once to show you have a vision

Do people on the dopamine drip really care how real their content is? Tons and tons of it is staged or modified anyways. I'm not sure there's anything Real™ on TikTok anyways.

Didn't explicitly think about this, but you're right. I already dismiss off the bat a lot of surprising video content because I don't trust it.

I mean, this is basically already status quo for YouTube Shorts. Tons and tons of shorts are AI-voice over either AI video or stock video covering some pithy thing in no actual depth, just piggybacking off of trending topics. And TikTok has had the same sort of content for even longer.

The "value" of short video content is already somewhat of a poor value proposition for this and other reasons. It lets you just obliterate time which can be handy in certain situations, but it also ruins your attention span.

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They might be forced to do so because the current inference pricing is not really covered by the 20$ monthly fee. Who knows what they have promised to the investors and the real cashflow is hard to be certain about with the circular nature of cross-investing between the biggest players.

Why is it one or the other? They have enough money to do both.

The amount of animal abuse videos I've seen is a bit disturbing. It only demonstrates how careless they have been, possibly intentionally. I know people on HN have been describing the various reasons why OpenAI has not been a good player, but seeing it first-hand is visceral in a way that makes me concerned about them as a company.

The problem is that we're already post truth.

Just consider how a screenshot of a tweet or made-up headline already spreads like a wildfire: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1980221072512635117

Sora involves far more work than what is required to spread misinfo.

Finally, people don't really care about the truth. They care about things that confirm their world view, or comfortable things. Or they dismiss things that are inconvenient for their tribe and focus on things that are inconvenient for other tribes.

I'm surprised this isn't a bigger concern given that:

For over a year now we've been at the point whereby a video of anyone saying or doing anything can be generated by anyone and put on the Internet, and it's only becoming more convincing (and rapidly)

We've been living in a post-truth world for almost ten years, so it's now become normalized

Almost half of the population has been conditioned to believe anything that supports their political alignment

People will actually believe incredibly far-fetched things, and when the original video has been debunked, will still hold the belief because by that point the Internet has filled up with more garbage to support something they really want to believe

It's a weird time to be alive

We will adjust. And guess what, before photography, people managed somehow. People gossiped all sorts of stuff, spread malicious runors and you had to guess what's a lie and what's not. The way people dealt with it was witness testimony and physical evidence.

Maybe they'll have to tour and meet people in person because videos will be devoid of trust.

On the other side we want to believe in something, so we'll believe in the video that will suit our beliefs.

It's an interesting struggle.

Well, maybe it's less about Sora, but how they push the world towards making their next product essential: WorldCoin [0], Altman's blockchain token system (the one with the alien orb) to scan everybody's biometric fingerprint and serve as the only Source of Truth for the World - controlled by one private company.

It's like the old saying: They create their own ecosystem. Circular stock market deals being the most obvious, but the WorldCoin has been for years in the making and Altman often described it as the only alternative in a post-truth world (the one he himself is making of course).

[0] https://www.forbes.com.au/news/innovation/worldcoin-crypto-p...

> the final pour that cements us into our post-truth world.

I find it a bit more concerning that anyone would not already understand how deeply we exist in a "post-truth" world. Every piece of information we've consumed for the last few decades has increasingly been shaped by algorithms optimizing someone else's target.

But the real danger of post-truth is when there is a still enough of a veneer of truth that you can use distortions to effectively manipulate the public. Losing that veneer is essentially a collapse of the whole system, which will have consequences I don't think we can really understand.

The pre and early days of social media were riddled with various "leaks" of private photos and video. But what does it mean to leak a nude photo of a celebrity when you can just as easily generate a photo that is indistinguishable? The entire reason leaks like that were so popular is precisely because people wanted a glimpse into something real about the private life of these screen personalities (otherwise 'leaks' and 'nude scenes' would have the same value). As image generation reaches the limit, it will be impossible to ever really distinguish between voyeurism and imagination.

Similarly we live in an age of mass surveillance, but what does surveillance footage mean when it can be trivially faked. Think of how radicalizing surveillance footage has been over the past few decades. Consider for example the video of the Rodney King beating. Increasingly such a video could not be trusted.

> I'm kinda terrified of the future of politics.

If you aren't already terrified enough of the present of politics, then I wouldn't be worried about what Sora brings us tomorrow. I honestly think what we'll see soon is not increasingly more powerful authoritarian systems, but the break down of systems of control everywhere. As these systems over-extend themselves they will collapse. The peak of social media power was to not let it go further than it was a few years ago, Sora represents a larger breakdown of these systems of control.

Flawless AI generated videos will result in video footage not being trusted.

This will simply take us back about 150 years to the time before the camera was common.

The transition period may be painful though.

It just makes trusted/verified sources more important, and more people to care about it. I wouldn't be terrified for politics so much as the raised barrier to entry (and concentration) of the press - people will pay attention to the BBC, Guardian, Times, but not (even less so) independentjourno.com; those sources will be more sceptical of whistleblowers and freelance investigative contributions, etc.

Hmm I have my doubts. I don't really understand the appeal of hyper-consumerism, brand focus, and big SM platform engagement. But I look over at my wife and she is clearly plugged in to a giant worldwide cultural movement of womens interests, product recommendations, and politics. It also appears to be the case that women are less likely to engage with AI. It's one of the big reasons I think it's a massive blunder to pursue AI erotica. I think a big part of the TikTok user base (women) will have to be persuaded to jump on the AI bandwagon and I'm not sure the industry is pursuing any products or features to woo that market.