Adiós, Sora

Today OpenAI announced that it was going to be shutting down the Sora image generation app, which I have openly expressed my…less than stellar opinion of in the past.

Right off the bat, I think that the concept behind the Sora app was a net negative to the AI space. I understand why it was made and what the goal was there, but that app did a disservice to the model and the tools that it would enable.

Let’s start right off the bat: creating a platform entirely made of deepfakes was never going to be a good idea. I don’t know who ever thought that was a good idea. It wasn’t.

In a vacuum, sure, you know all of the videos on the platform are AI-generated, but we don’t live in a vacuum. These videos can go anywhere and OpenAI’s own tools can be used to make it harder to tell whether the video is real or fake by changing the metadata with Codex or simply just using Sora or ChatGPT to remove the watermarks.

The Bigger Picture

The thing is: the death of Sora isn’t an isolated event; we’ve been seeing the shine start to fade on consumer AI tools in little bits. OpenAI is focusing on Codex, Disney is pulling out of its deal with OpenAI, Microsoft Copilot sucks, and we’re really left with Google and (in theory) Apple pushing for consumer AI use.

These new companies came in and tried to push into the consumer market because they thought they had a chance to disrupt Apple and Google and upend the phone as The Thing™ that people use. We saw that with Rabbit and Humane. The Browser Company got acquired by Atlassian, and tools like Notion, Linear, and others are really made for work.

Where to Go From Here

I think that we’re going to start to see other companies pushing consumer AI start to fade. There’s not as much there to disrupt as these companies previously thought and that’s fine. This type of AI has been transformative in business (especially development) and that’s a great achievement. This means that we as developers can more effectively go about bringing new features and products to the people.

Google and Apple are still going to have a stranglehold on the consumer space because they have access to the platforms. They have the access to this context, and no amount of adding “library” tabs to apps is going to change the fact that everyone’s data is in iCloud and Google Drive.

As a consumer, I welcome a slowdown of the AI being shoved down everyone’s throats and, as a developer, I’m super excited to see what we can do with the technology and what we can bring to the consumer space.