OpenAI just killed Sora. What does this tell us about building AI products right now?
The news dropped yesterday: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video app, six months after launch. The Disney $1B deal is off, and the API is going away, too.
The arc is fascinating if you zoom out. The app launched in September 2025, hit the top of the App Store within a day, and reached 1M downloads faster than ChatGPT did. By January, downloads had dropped 45%, and the whole thing had made roughly $2.1M in in-app purchases over its lifetime.
What killed it was a combination of deepfake controversies that forced OpenAI to keep restricting what you could create, copyright chaos, and a compute cost that clearly wasn't justified by the retention numbers. The resources are now going toward coding tools, reasoning, and enterprise products ahead of their IPO.
On this, a learning for me is that hype and retention are completely different metrics, and "most downloaded app in X category" means nothing if you can't solve the moderation and trust problem at scale.
Do you think this is a story about AI video being too early, or about Sora specifically being the wrong product for OpenAI to own? And if you're building in the AI space, how are you thinking about your own "is this compute worth it?" question?
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