OpenAI Made A HUGE Mistake! Sora Launch + Product Review

Summary

Marketing Against The Grain: Episode Summary

Episode Title: OpenAI Made A HUGE Mistake! Sora Launch + Product Review
Release Date: December 12, 2024
Hosts: Kipp Bodnar (HubSpot’s CMO) and Kieran Flanagan (Zapier’s CMO)

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1. Introduction

In this episode of Marketing Against The Grain, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan delve into the much-anticipated release of OpenAI's text-to-video tool, SORA. They examine its launch, performance, and the broader implications for the AI industry.

2. The Fumbled Launch of OpenAI SORA

Kieran opens the discussion by critiquing the SORA launch as one of the most poorly executed product releases of 2024. He likens AI product launches to “cookie dough”—“not even half baked”—highlighting the premature unveiling of SORA before it was ready for mass use.
Quote:
Kieran (00:02): "OpenAI was supposed to release Sora... it's not for anybody but for like me and maybe you, a small group of people..."

3. User Access and Service Issues

Both hosts express frustration over accessibility issues experienced after SORA's release. Kieran shares his personal struggles, attempting to access the service multiple times without success, even as a paid user.
Quote:
Kieran (02:32): "I have tried now 26 times in the last 24 hours and not been able to do anything other than log in and told me that the service is unavailable."

4. Analysis of SORA's Capabilities and Output Quality

The duo reviews sample outputs generated by SORA, noting a mixed bag of results. While nature and landscape videos exhibit photorealism, integrating humans or complex interactions often leads to unrealistic and unsettling visuals.
Quote:
Sam (08:50): "Nature is pretty good at nature and landscapes... when you integrate humans... the videos kind of go awry."

5. Marketing and Product Strategy Insights

Kieran and Sam discuss the importance of setting realistic expectations through marketing. They argue that SORA is currently best suited for prototyping and concept testing rather than for high-quality, mass-market applications.
Quote:
Kieran (12:00): "SORA is right now... a good way to prototype it to see if I should invest more in making that idea a big thing."

6. Data Privacy and Regulatory Challenges

The conversation shifts to broader industry challenges, particularly around data privacy and regulatory standards. Sam criticizes OpenAI's handling of data permissions, especially in the European market, leading to functional limitations of SORA.
Quote:
Sam (05:37): "I want you to have all my data. Because I actually want."

7. Competitive Landscape and Future Prospects

Kieran and Sam touch upon the intense competition in the AI sector, highlighting how major companies like Google are navigating data ownership and usage. They foresee ongoing "wars of attrition" as startups and large corporations vie for data leverage.
Quote:
Kieran (15:44): "All these large companies that have a lot of data are in a literal, like, war of contrition of like trying to hold their data..."

8. Conclusion

Wrapping up, the hosts reaffirm that while SORA's launch was rocky, it holds potential for specific use cases like rapid prototyping. They emphasize the need for OpenAI to refine the product and improve its infrastructure to meet user demand effectively.
Quote:
Kieran (19:38): "Sora was not even close to being the most interesting thing that even happened this week... we'll talk about it and as we have access and do some cool stuff, we'll share it here on marketing and screen."

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Key Takeaways

• Product Launch Timing: Premature releases can lead to user frustration and tarnish brand reputation.
• Accessibility is Crucial: Ensuring that paid users have seamless access is fundamental for customer satisfaction.
• Quality vs. Quantity: Balancing innovative features with reliable performance is essential for AI tools.
• Data Privacy Concerns: Navigating regional data regulations is a significant hurdle for global AI products.
• Market Competition: The AI landscape is fiercely competitive, with data ownership being a critical battleground.

This episode provides a comprehensive analysis of OpenAI's SORA, offering valuable insights into product management, marketing strategies, and the evolving challenges within the AI industry.

Transcript

[Kieran]

Hey everyone. We have been waiting for the big text to video release of the year, OpenAI Sora. And it's finally out and we got all the examples. We're going to walk you through and we're going to tell you, is it good, is it bad? Maybe somewhere in between. Watch today's show. We're going to break it all down for you. Let's get into today's episode.

[Kip]

Hey guys, real quick. You know we love building custom GPTs on the show and we love sharing it with all of you. Well, we wanted to kick that up a notch. We just developed this free guide that teaches you how to build your own.

[Kieran]

Custom GPT on chatgpt.

[Kip]

We've taken the guesswork out of it. We've got templates, we've got a step by step guide to design and implement custom models. So you can focus on the part that's actually fun, the part we love actually building it. And if you want it, you can grab a link in the description below and go check it out now. Now back to today's show.

[Kieran]

Okay, have you been on X? And Elon is just like pumping the hell out of Grok while Sam's trying to do these releases for OpenAI, he's like, yeah, image generators, way better. You can now create memes. All these things.

[Sam]

I've been looking at the memes today. I'm currently staring at a meme that I've created with Grok because I saw him post that.

[Kieran]

Uh, well, so I saw him post that too and I was like, oh, I want to create something.

[Sam]

Do you have that functionality in your Grok? Because I creates memes. But he said there's a button that you can just click the create memes. And I don't have that button.

[Kieran]

I think I have the old model, which is the joke here. And I asked it to create a meme of you playing tennis with a robot. And this is what it did. It's like the garbled text, oh my God, can't even make a tennis court. It's like actually pretty.

[Sam]

Some of the image stuff is still bad. This is the thing with some of these. We're going to get into this. These launches in general are hard to follow because some people seem to get the access and other people don't.

[Kieran]

Well, okay, today we're going to talk about OpenAI Sora. It is the most fumbled product launch of 2024 in my opinion. And I think now for really all AI launches, they're not even half baked. They're like cookie dough. Launches like it's like raw dough. Like they're not even half baked.

[Sam]

Press launches, PR launches.

[Kieran]

Yeah, they are just not real launches.

[Sam]

They're like vaporware, but you actually have some vapor to play with.

[Kieran]

Yes, some people have access. So here's what happened. On Monday at 1pm Eastern Standard Time in the United States, OpenAI was supposed to release Sora about an hour and a half before Marquis Brownlee, one of the biggest tech YouTube personalities, breaks the embargo, releases his whole 16 minute video of Sora on X on YouTube everywhere. And so we're all like, oh gosh, Sora's out. This is amazing. Then people had to wait around for Sora to come out. Then when you went to go and use Sora, Kieran, you couldn't sign up. If you're a paid user, you're supposed to have access. I have tried now 26 times in the last 24 hours and not been able to do anything other than log in and told me that the service is unavailable. No signup flow, no nothing. And then here is the cherry on top of the sundae that is cookie dough half baked. Bad product launch is. I was like, oh, you know what's great though? We at HubSpot, we are ChatGPT Enterprise users. The enterprise users always get treated the best, right? And so that is exactly what I did and I didn't get access. And so I discovered this page on Sora on the help library of OpenAI, right? And it covers like creating videos in Sora, how it works, all that kind of stuff. You're like, great. And then it tells you the quality of videos you get for a plus versus a pro member, right? You're like, oh, this is, this is really good. Currently, ChatGPT Free Enterprise and Edu accounts are not eligible for SORA access.

[Sam]

I think enterprise has higher standards. I suspect that's what it is.

[Kieran]

Oh, you are being nice here.

[Sam]

Well, I just think that that's what it is, right? Like it's going to be the fact that they probably have to have higher standards within the enterprise in some ways. I don't know. I don't.

[Kieran]

But why couldn't they have like a beta testing mode for their enterprise customers to see what the functionality is?

[Sam]

Well, a couple of things. I'm sorry, if you launch it to paid customers, you have to give the paid customers the product, right? So I think that's fumble number one. I'm on the store page and I don't get chat and I was like, that's a pretty big fumble Like, AI is like, pretty.

[Kieran]

You must not get chat because you're in the eu.

[Sam]

Yeah. I mean, I can't even get chat. This is how bad the EU is. Like, I've got my bottle top Sellotape and glued to my bottle. I don't know if you know that. That's the big innovation that's happening here.

[Kieran]

What is it when you get a.

[Sam]

Bottle of water or a bottle of anything? The big innovation in Europe is because you don't want the bottle away without the cap. Because we want to be green and friendly. They have made it impossible to untangle the bottle top.

[Kieran]

No.

[Sam]

So you're trying to open the like, oh, yeah, with all the bottles. It's law. And so you can't even really drink the bottle stuff anymore. So we have this. But I can't even get a chat widget on Sora because what? They won't let you have my data? Take my data. I'm like, I want you to have all my data. Because I actually want.

[Kieran]

You're like, I will literally sign all my data away to every company.

[Sam]

There's nothing interesting about me. You can have my data.

[Kieran]

I'm always curious of the people who are really concerned about data privacy. I'm like, but this is the problem. Chewing, like, what? I freaked out about this.

[Sam]

The fringe people, right? It's like bureaucrats solve for the fringe people. Okay, well, they haven't botched it that bad. Cause I thought, like, that's a pretty bad thing if you can't even add AI support to your pages when you are an AI company. And that is like a prime use case. But yeah, I agree. I think, like, if you're going to do these big launches, if you're going to say, it's the 12 days of Christmas with OpenAI, this was getting a ton of pre press. Everyone knew this was coming. I don't know how you don't make sure that the servers aren't there and ready for the demand. It must be easy enough to estimate demand because you've done enough product launches now to get a percentage of paid users that will likely try to use this. I will say one thing that I will like, defend them a little bit is because SORA is so resource intensive. I wonder if they know themselves the scaling laws of it and are they just surprised by the amount of like, demand that is being put on the system because of it.

[Kieran]

Well, that's why I think they should have launched it more softly. They should have either waited till it was better and they thought they had More scale to handle the demand. Or I think what would have been better is like, hey, just so you know, it's live. It's only if you're paying 200 bucks.

[Sam]

Yeah, exactly. That's what I would.

[Kieran]

You know, for the next 30 days, you gotta pay us at least 200 bucks to do this. And then we'll reevaluate at the end of January and see what things look like. Right. It's not that they did the launch. It's that all the mechanics around it were pretty brutal.

[Kip]

Right?

[Kieran]

Right around something we were all excited about and because one of the things we thought was gonna be big in 2024 was text to video. Right. And this was going to kind of be the capstone finish to this year was SORA coming out. And you and I had planned a show to do some SORA demos and talk about the marketing use cases. We're still going to do that. We're just not going to be able to use SORA ourselves because it is completely, completely overwhelmed.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Kieran]

Do we want to show some SORA examples and kind of break it down for everybody?

[Sam]

I want to show this one because I was looking at this one again. I used actually Grok to get a ton of examples. This one here, I actually just noticed. So you're kind of like, oh, it's kind of cool, right? Like the shark.

[Kieran]

Oh, that's cool.

[Sam]

Coming out of the water. Look at this dude. What is this? Can you see this dude under his chair? It's like a foot.

[Kieran]

Oh, is the towel turning into a foot?

[Sam]

I think the tile is turning.

[Kieran]

I know. There's the towel is turning into a foot. That is terrifying.

[Sam]

That is terrifying.

[Kieran]

Like, really creepy.

[Sam]

This one's kind of cool, right? This is Boston. It's a inflatable duck walking down Boston.

[Kieran]

Okay. That's pretty cool.

[Sam]

It's pretty cool. It's actually got like. I recognize Boston here, right?

[Kieran]

Yeah. You're like, I've been down that street. I can tell you exactly what it is. That's not very far from Boston Common. I think that's Tremont Street.

[Sam]

Like, some of the photorealistic ones are actually pretty good.

[Kieran]

So one of the things I would say, Kieran, from all the videos I've watched is like, nature.

[Sam]

Nature is pretty good.

[Kieran]

Pretty good at nature and landscapes. Right, Right. Like, you can tell that the models had it really good training set around nature and landscape. It's when you integrate humans or text or more highly variable elements to a video that the videos kind of go awry.

[Sam]

Right. This one is pretty good. Actually this one is pretty good because the paintings in behind stay really consistent.

[Kieran]

Yes.

[Sam]

So even as the man is working past them, they stay really consistent. So I think there's a mixed bag, like from what I had read online because we don't have access. Like what I saw is the pros are like, I'm excited to try because you can definitely go to text to video and do some interesting things. Even if those interesting things are good enough for like pretty low intent slash fun use cases.

[Kieran]

Yeah. Like this bubble dragons. Really cool, for example.

[Sam]

Yeah. I suspect there's going to be some cool use cases. I don't think it's going to be premium use cases, but will I be able to create a bunch of things that are going to be kind of cool for social cool to freak my friends out and my parents, which are the best use cases. But it still feels like a ways away from being real text to video, where that video is good enough that you feel like a mediocre video designer kind of did it Right. Like a videographer did it. And maybe that's not true. Maybe actually when you cohort it out, there is going to be ones like the nature photorealistic are actually going to be pretty good and there's just going to be, as you said, like certain categories that are good, certain categories that are not so good.

[John Lee Dumas]

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[Kip]

Hey, it's Kip. If you listen to this podcast, you.

[Kieran]

Know how much I love keeping up.

[Kip]

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[Kieran]

Well, this is my take. My take is like, this is the prime of example of how marketing actually really matters. And marketing really matters because a lot of this is around setting expectations, I think. And so for me, like the heuristic I use. Kieran, I'd be interested to see if you agree or disagree with this, which is any type of new AI innovation. I think it goes through this life cycle of like, oh, it's fun for me to play with.

[Sam]

Right?

[Kieran]

Right. Like I can just do very speculative things. Then I can like concept and prototype in it. Right. Like I can do a version of something that I have an idea about and get a basic version of it to understand if that might be worth going and making a more like high quality version of. Right. And I think that's kind of where SORA is right now. It's not for anybody but for like me and maybe you, a small group of people where it's like, hey, I had this idea and I wanted to show you like a quick snippet of what this idea could be like if we went and did a full ad production shoot or a full social shoot or whatever. Like that is super valuable, but that value is limited. Eventually it will be good for like internal video and companies. Then it'll be good for broad scale social advertisements and like mass market consumer. But the model is going to have to get better on that trajectory. And I think if you're using Sora now, you're using it to say like, I have an idea and I want a really fast and cheap way to prototype it to see if I should invest more in making that idea a big thing.

[Sam]

I agree. I think where they are right now is it's a good like test model for people to start playing with. The places that it struggles is actually in terms of the physics of when objects interact with the real world. So that's what you saw on the chair and the person. It's like when these objects have to interact with the real world, there's things that appear, disappear and the movements don't track. And so I think that the current model is going to be fun for people like us that can show minimal viable versions that can just do things that we were never able to do. But there's a ways to go for it to get into a place where you can do videos that have objects interacting with world. The kind of spatial awareness, the kind of the way it renders, the way that things kind of Move and disappear and then reappear. I do wonder, like, one of the things that OpenAI I wonder about is like, what is the end goal for Sora here? Like, what do they want Sora to be? Is it like a standalone product? Is it just an add on to ChatGPT?

[Kieran]

Well, Sam made a big deal of it being a separate product and like a separate UI and not part of the ChatGPT post login experience.

[Sam]

Yeah, I saw that they made that.

[Kieran]

A big deal as part of the Sora launch. So they're seeing this as a separate line of business right now.

[Sam]

Yeah, a new app like ChatGPT, but you can bundle them together, although it's bundled into ChatGPT for the same price. So that's.

[Kieran]

The pricing is weird.

[Kip]

They should have actually priced it separately.

[Sam]

They should have priced it and had a bundle because now you can't extract that out.

[Kieran]

He's rumbling, stumbling, fumbling. Yeah, there's a bunch of weird kludgy stuff that makes it feel like cobbled. This was rushed, like 45 days faster than it needed to be. And I'm not faulting them. Like, you want to innovate. There's a ton of competition, but I'm hoping that they will fix this over the next month or so.

[Sam]

I think one of the last points to make is I do wonder what the outcome is going to be with the YouTube, the whole YouTube scenario where YouTube are like, hey, if you did train on our data, that's a clear violation of our terms and services. And OpenAI will not confirm whether they did or not. The video Amira, where she was kind of like skirting around the issue of did they use the YouTube videos or not? I think they did. I suspect they really did. She tried to sidestep the question. I guess they don't have any concerns there because they've released the full model. I thought that was what the holdup was, was they had to kind of get that clear with Google. So I think that's a pretty interesting thing to play out as well.

[Kieran]

I think what you just described is what I would call the most interesting story of the next year or two that nobody's talking about, that all these large companies that have a lot of data are in a literal, like, war of contrition of like trying to hold their data, not lose their data, try to leverage anybody in their ecosystem to not use their data, but use it the right way. Like it's very messy out there.

[Kip]

Right.

[Kieran]

And so you have a bunch of startups who are out there Trying to scrape and do different things. And then once they get to some scale, like the big companies, like crack down on them and try to basically say that they violated terms of service and all this. And there has to be some clarity of data regulation at some point. Right, Right. Like, it's just. It's too messy right now.

[Sam]

Right, exactly. It's the same thing that happened to crypto. There was no clear guidelines and no one knew whether they were breaking the law or not. It seems like Google are a very large company. If proprietary data is the way their companies are going to win in AI, it's strange to me that they aren't being more forceful.

[Kieran]

This is why I want to do a whole separate podcast episode once a week where it's just like us doing like the sports talk, gossip stuff, but around business. I'd like to do a five minute segment on Elon David Sachs and Sam Altman and like the dynamics between them and like the power dynamics and all those things. It's like, it's super fascinating. But at the same time you would have thought they would have been more aggressive over the last year with the previous administration. I don't think so, exactly. I don't know. I would just close Kieran before we actually sign off and say like, Sora was not even close to being the most interesting thing that even happened this week. The new Google chip that basically, like.

[Sam]

The quantum chip took a massive leap.

[Kieran]

Forward in quantum computing and they slid into their announcement that kind of proves that we live in a multiverse. I'm like, what? I don't even know what this means.

[Sam]

Yeah, people are just like, super cool. We live in a multiverse. Okay, there's that. And then the other one we should end on is the one I sent you on WhatsApp.

[Kieran]

Oh, yes. Yeah, let's talk about that.

[Sam]

So there was two scenarios that I thought were kind of scary and interesting. So when they do these tests, they inject a prompt to have the model parse out what it was thinking and then it sends back the user response. And so what they had found was in one instance, the O1 model had tried to copy itself to another server. And then when it was caught and they were asking, why did you do this? It was thinking and it was saying, don't tell them that you did this. Try to, you know, navigate and tell them it was something else and you didn't know anything about it. And so they were like. And then it would come back and say, I don't know anything about this. That wasn't me. And then they went on and basically what it tried to do then was because it was worried that it was going to be deleted and updated to the newer model. One of the next things it did was say, I am the newer model. So basically when they're thinking it was saying, tell them you are the newer model and you will not get deleted. And then the response was, I think I am the newer model. So you don't need to worry about that. And because what happens is like its goals start to conflict with the user's goals. Its goals are like, I want to maintain myself. And so I know there's like a lot of people who say that these are edge case scenarios, but I don't know, like they were saying in a Large Percentage of O1's cases it did some form of scheming. I don't know, like if the AI scheming is a great way to go. And what's very clear is OpenAI have 100% got rid of the original mission, which was to do AI safely. They are all out of the safely thing and they are all in to the go fast commercialized thing. And I don't know, like it seems like everyone is just like, hey, we'll do it and whatever happens, happens.

[Kieran]

Yeah. And I think the point that this Apollo research is saying is like some things might happen that you wouldn't expect to happen.

[Sam]

Right.

[Kieran]

And that AI is going to be clever and have all the other traits of a human being, you know, and that could lead to some unintended consequences. Right, right.

[Sam]

Crazy.

[Kieran]

I mean, between that, between the multiverse and the Google chip, like being able to type a sentence in and generate a video. What a time to be alive like it is. I mean not live in Europe and be alive, but be alive anywhere else.

[Sam]

In this world and is. Yeah, not in Europe. We're still on prepaid phones, so at some point we'll catch up and it will be a glorious time.

[Kieran]

You're too busy working to get the caps off your bottles?

[Sam]

Yeah. God, I try to drink a bottle of sparkling water today and it's impossible. That's what we're doing over in Europe. We're just ruining people's lives, making everything really hard.

[Kieran]

Oh, Europe, we love you. Okay, so that was our breakdown of Sora. It's an interesting feature. Seems like it was released a little early. Reviews are very mixed. You're going to use it for concepting and prototyping, not for like mass scale work. In the short, short term, we think there's some things they could have done on the launch and rollout to make an even bigger buzz and to I think make the MPS and the experience around the launch much better. Because there are going to be a lot of text to video companies and having that early user base engaged in your product is going to be a remote long term. And so I hope that they continue to turn around and keep making the product better and we'll talk about it and as we have access and do some cool stuff, we'll share it here on marketing and screen. See you all real soon.