OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, is pulling out of its artificial intelligence video generation service Sora. The decision comes approximately two years after Sora was first unveiled in February 2024.
The Sora team announced the withdrawal on its official X (formerly Twitter) account on Saturday. "We are saying goodbye to the Sora app," the team said. "We know the work you created with Sora was valuable and that this news is disappointing. We will provide further details on the service shutdown timeline and how to preserve your work."
Sora was first launched in February 2024, and its successor Sora 2 was released in September last year.
OpenAI's decision to exit Sora is interpreted as an effort to concentrate the company's resources on enterprise-facing businesses such as coding ahead of its planned initial public offering this year. According to the Wall Street Journal and technology outlet The Information, CEO Sam Altman explained the rationale in a memo to employees on Saturday. "We want to focus on capital raising, supply chain management, and building data centers at an unprecedented scale," Altman wrote.
Sources say complaints had previously been raised within OpenAI that operating the Sora service was wasting computational resources. Altman said the Sora team would take on long-term projects such as robotics going forward.
Controversies surrounding Sora, including copyright infringement and deepfakes, also appear to have contributed to the shutdown. The Motion Picture Association of America issued a statement in October last year saying that "Sora 2 is being used to make unauthorized use of copyrighted content," and demanded "immediate and decisive action" from OpenAI. U.S. civic group Public Citizen argued that the Sora service made it easy to create and distribute deepfakes and called for the service to be discontinued.
OpenAI's decision to shut down Sora also derailed a three-year licensing agreement and a $1 billion (approximately 1.5 trillion won) investment partnership signed with Walt Disney Company in December last year. Disney said it "respects OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and prioritize other areas as AI technology in this nascent field evolves rapidly."