OpenAI’s Sora was once the scariest app on your phone — and now it’s being shut down

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it is shutting down Sora, a TikTok-like social app that launched six months ago. OpenAI did not provide a reason for the shutdown, nor did it share information about when it will officially shut down.

When Sora first opened as an invite-only social network, it seemed like everyone was demanding an invite. But like Meta’s Horizon Worlds — the company’s virtual reality social platform — which is also plagued by turmoil despite once being central to the company’s notorious turnaround, Sora has had no real staying power. Although Sora 2’s core video and audio generation model is frighteningly impressive, there hasn’t been sustained interest in the AI-only social feed.

Sora was intended to act like TikTok’s AI-first app, replicating the recognizable interface of a vertical video feed. Its main feature, “embossing,” allowed people to scan their faces and create realistic deep fakes of themselves. These “appearances” can be made public, allowing anyone to make videos of their own appearances. (Cameo sued OpenAI over the name of this feature and ruled, forcing the company to change it to “Characters.”)

In a turn of events that surprised literally no one, this deepfake app was downright bizarre.

At launch, Sora looked like a minefield of creepy Sam Altman videos. I’ll never be the same after watching a real-life version of OpenAI’s CEO walk through a fattened pig slaughterhouse and ask, “Are my pigs enjoying their food?”

Sora wasn’t supposed to let people make videos of public figures who didn’t explicitly opt in, but it was very easy to evade OpenAI’s guardrails. Sure enough, deepfakes of real people like civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and actor Robin Williams prompted their daughters to take to Instagram and ask users to stop making videos of their dead parents.

After creating dozens of videos in which Sam Altman steals Nvidia chips from a target, users switched gears. Instead, they intentionally created content using copyrighted characters, leading to legal problems for the man they loved through deepfakes — we saw Mario smoking weed, Naruto ordering a Krabby Patty, and Pikachu doing ASMR.

This did not unfold as planned. Instead of filing a lawsuit, Disney, a notoriously litigious company, gave OpenAI a $1 billion investment and a licensing deal that would have allowed Sora to create videos featuring characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.

It seemed like a historic moment for the AI ​​industry. But with Sora gone, so is the deal – although it appears that no money actually changed hands before it collapsed. (Disney had some polite words about the whole thing on Tuesday, telling The Hollywood Reporter that it “will continue to engage with AI platforms” going forward.)

The initial hype around Sora was real. The app peaked in November with about 3,332,200 downloads across the iOS App Store and Google Play, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Appfigures. If the app had continued to grow, maybe OpenAI could have kept it going, but that’s not what happened. By February, it had dropped to 1,128,700 downloads. This seems like a big number, until you remember that ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users.

Appfigures estimates that during its lifetime, Sora generated about $2.1 million from in-app purchases, allowing users to purchase more video creation credits. It’s hard to imagine Sora’s computing requirements tipped the scales too much for a company already operating at a huge loss, but perhaps the app was too big of a burden to keep around if it wasn’t growing.

When OpenAI launched Sora, it prepared for a world where we could have the tools to deepfake each other at our fingertips. Although I rarely make TikToks, I felt compelled to post a public service announcement that this scary technology was coming fast. It ended up getting over 300,000 views, which isn’t the norm for my often dormant TikTok account, but it got a real response from people. I never expected it would only last six months.

But just because Sora is gone doesn’t mean the threat is gone with him. The Sora 2 model is still available — it’s behind a ChatGPT paywall. OpenAI is not alone in making this technology accessible to everyone. It’s only a matter of time before the next AI-driven social video app hits the market, and we’re inundated with another tsunami of clips of Snow White storming the Capitol.