Why OpenAI killed Sora (no, it wasn't government pressure)

Lots of conspiracy theories flying around here in the last few days.

What I think is really going on:

OpenAI is getting ready for an IPO this year.

At the same time Claude gets a ton of attention and is already successful with the only valuable target audiences today: coders and businesses.

Also Google has leapfrogged them in lots of places and is still going full steam ahead. It's crazy how quickly they've been moving.

Oh, and not to forget about Elon's company mashup including xAI that's going to IPO as well this year.

In a nutshell: OpenAI is under a lot of pressure. They need all the resources they can get.

Mind you: resources are more than just money. The most important resource for AI companies right now is compute. Sora took a lot of that while also losing money without a clear path to profitability. Plus all the highly paid engineers working on it.

They had to make some hard decisions. They did. We'll see if it helped and was enough.