Berber Jin (2:08)

All the conversations about whether we'd be watching AI generated movies and there'd be no more actors and actresses and like no more screenwriters. Like that was because of Sora.

Jessica Mendoza (2:23)

But then just a few weeks ago, OpenAI did a 180 on Sora. All right, we got some breaking news

Business News Announcer (2:28)

out of the business world. OpenAI saying it's shutting down its video generation platform. Sora. You see the post here on Sora's

Berber Jin (2:34)

this was a shock, I think for everyone. Sora felt really integral to Sam Altman's vision for the company to kind of branch into the realms of popular culture and entertainment. And so when they shut it down, it was this very abrupt, sudden, unpredictable moment that I think also kind of speaks to just how quickly OpenAI's identity is changing as a company.

Jessica Mendoza (3:03)

Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica mendoza. It's Tuesday, April 7th. Coming up on the show the end of Sora and what it says about the future of the AI industry.

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Jessica Mendoza (5:06)

For OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, products like Sora were key to his vision for the technology.

Berber Jin (5:13)

A lot of Silicon Valley companies were built around making HR workflows easier or building software that can make it easier for you to do note taking or the slacks of the world communicate with colleagues. That was never really his belief in what Silicon Valley could be, and Sora was part of this broader vision that he had to kind of take these more ambitious moonshot bets with the technology.

Jessica Mendoza (5:41)

When Sora first launched, it was only available to paid ChatGPT subscribers. But in September of last year, OpenAI launched a Sora app with a social media feed where people could make and post videos.

Berber Jin (5:54)

That's where some of the more like, AI slop videos came in, where people were splicing their faces into different scenes and kind of using it for more silly, goofy videos.

Jessica Mendoza (6:07)

I meant Bigfoot or whatever type of video.

Berber Jin (6:10)

Yes. And then the one that was kind of not great for OpenAI was a lot of users started using Martin Luther King Jr. S likeness. I have a dream that Xbox game Pass ultimate was still $20 and having him do kind of very silly things. I have a dream that Sam Altman saves humanity instead of making AI slope, which was a bit of a PR nightmare for OpenAI.

Jessica Mendoza (6:39)

King's estate complained about the videos, which led the platform to announce that it had removed his likeness. Did the company expect to make money from Sora?

Berber Jin (6:51)

So the bet that they were making was that they really wanted this thing to go viral and then figure out how to turn it into a money making business afterwards.

Jessica Mendoza (7:01)

And Sora was generating a lot of hype, so much so that even Disney wanted in. The entertainment giant announced it would partner with OpenAI to license hundreds of Disney characters so people could generate videos with them for Disney.

Berber Jin (7:15)

I think it was an important moment for them because they felt like AI was going to change the way that entertainment companies operated and changed their creative processes. And for Disney, the deal with OpenAI was a landmark moment that kind of showed that there was a future where they could coexist and work with an AI company in a way that they felt respected their own ip.

Jessica Mendoza (7:41)

Was any other AI company doing anything like Sora at that point?

Berber Jin (7:47)

Google has invested a lot of money into video generation, and there are some startups that are also working on video generation technology. But very interestingly, Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest startup rival, avoided going into video generation, particularly because it just costs a lot of money. It costs more money to like train and run video models than it does to run the language models that power chatbots. And so OpenAI was really the face of it.

Jessica Mendoza (8:21)

So OpenAI decides it's going to double down on Sora. Its rivalanthropic decided to go in a different direction. Can you say more about that?

Berber Jin (8:30)

Yeah. So Anthropic, obviously this startup rival for OpenAI, that's putting them on their back heels. They are really focused on building AI tools for businesses that are looking to integrate AI into their workforce.

Jessica Mendoza (8:45)

Anthropic's approach was more focused on agentic AI, the kind of AI that's like an assistant. It does the boring stuff for you, like scheduling emails, developing software, or analyzing data. How do you think about the contrast between these two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic? Like, would it be fair to say that in this AI race they define themselves in opposition to each other?

Berber Jin (9:09)

They very much do. We've reported the very ugly history between Sam Altman and Dario Amadei, who is the CEO of Anthropic.

Business News Announcer (9:18)

The most high profile rivalry in tech

Berber Jin (9:21)

is heating up in 2026 as both

Business News Announcer (9:23)

OpenAI and Anthropic Race ahead. Anthropic released a series of ads that directly mocked ChatGPT. Two of AI's biggest rivals, Anthropic's Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman, are going viral after a public snub.

Narrator/Promoter (9:37)

So that's OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amadei not holding hands during a group.

Berber Jin (9:43)

And I mean, in Silicon Valley, it just depends on who you talk to. Like, it's almost like they're two different camps in terms of who people are kind of sympathetic or allied to.

Jessica Mendoza (9:55)

Berber says the distinction really came into focus when OpenAI launched the Sora app. That same month, Anthropic came out with a new version of its coding model.

Berber Jin (10:05)

And starting last fall, they kind of took Silicon Valley by storm with the release of a new version of Claude code, which is their AI coding agent. If you talk to any software engineer in Silicon Valley, they will rave about Claude code, about how they don't have to work anymore, how AI is becoming so much smarter than them, how they think their jobs are going to be obsolete. And Anthropic really was driving that conversation.

Jessica Mendoza (10:32)

The two rivals are both planning to go public, potentially even this year. And Berber says going into 2026, the huge success of Anthropic's Claude code sparked panic inside OpenAI.

Berber Jin (10:44)

They've been very much in code red mode for the past few months because they were seeing that they were losing the enterprise race and they realized that their models were just not as good when it came to coding. And as a result, they just began taking a much more critical look at all the other projects that they had previously greenlit at OpenAI.

Jessica Mendoza (11:12)

So how did Altman's vision for AI video end up on the chopping block? That's next.

Business News Announcer (11:27)

K Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Berber Jin (11:36)

It's not a battle so glad the

Jessica Mendoza (11:38)

Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Berber Jin (11:41)

It is an honor to share.

Narrator/Promoter (11:43)

No, it's our honor.

Berber Jin (11:45)

It is our larger honor.

Jessica Mendoza (11:46)

No, really stop.

Business News Announcer (11:48)

You can really, really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side

Berber Jin (11:55)

and participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Jessica Mendoza (12:04)

OpenAI has a reputation for taking big swings. Altman has described the company's approach as startups within a startup.

Berber Jin (12:11)

There's the team that's working on the new hardware device. There was the Sora team. There was a team working on like an AI powered browser. And it kind of made sense because AI is very unpredictable. And they wanted to empower their researchers to be able to spin up different techniques for improving AI.

Jessica Mendoza (12:32)

But all of those experiments and projects use a processing power and the company only has so much of it.

Berber Jin (12:38)

All the labs are basically rationing chips. Every team inside OpenAI is begging for more competing resources. And what employees who were there at the time would say is that the way the AI chips were allocated between teams was very unpredictable. Like, you could wake up one week and it would become very clear that like, some new team had received a massive amount of computing resources.

Jessica Mendoza (13:03)

Sora was one of those teams because video generation uses a lot of computing resources. When we talk about it uses a lot of compute, like, do we have kind of like X number versus like a chatgpt?

Berber Jin (13:17)

We don't, and the company doesn't disclose it. But what I can say is that if you talk to researchers at OpenAI, I mean, a lot of them were a little bit surprised by the amount of computing resources that the SOAR team got. So Soar was this really interesting case study for that culture. Because the team worked separately from the research division. A lot of other OpenAI employees didn't really know what Sora was up to.

Jessica Mendoza (13:45)

Berber says this sort of compute power could be justified for an AI model or app that was bringing in money or new users. But Sora wasn't really doing either.

Berber Jin (13:56)

Sora had a very brief moment in the sun the week after it was released. It rocketed to the top of the App Store and stayed there for a short while after. But then it immediately plummeted and kind of flatlined out at around a little bit under 500,000 users a day from a high of over a million. And I think OpenAI has realized that recreating that ChatGPT moment has been a lot harder than they expected. OpenAI was hoping that people would love using the app, refer their friends. It would kind of Ingrain itself in the pop culture. And that just never really happened.

Jessica Mendoza (14:34)

This was all especially problematic with OpenAI tightening its purse strings ahead of that potential IPO later this year. And so sora's fate was sealed.

Berber Jin (14:46)

The SORA team was about to start another very expensive training run to basically build the next, more sophisticated version of sora. And then OpenAI executives saw how much it would cost and were just like, we can't really afford to make this trade off, and so let's just kill the whole thing. And that's the thing that was really surprising because it wasn't a huge business for them, but just because it was so tied to the company's identity, like, I think it would have been hard to predict them getting rid of video generation altogether.

Jessica Mendoza (15:21)

After the announcement, Altman wrote a message to employees explaining the decision. He said the move was a necessary sacrifice for the good of the company. A quote, difficult trade off.

Berber Jin (15:31)

And it's interesting, I mean, he very much seemed to realize just this new moment that OpenAI was in where ahead of an IPO, with tremendous competitive pressure, they had to kind of ditch a vision for the company that he really believed in.

Jessica Mendoza (15:50)

Was it kind of an. Kind of an L for Altman?

Berber Jin (15:53)

Yeah, it was an L for Altman because, I mean, he was really personally invested in Sora.

Jessica Mendoza (16:03)

What about OpenAI's big partnership with Disney? When OpenAI pulled the plug on Sora, what did it mean for that deal?

Berber Jin (16:10)

That whole vision for Sora, it was kind of whiplash for them, right? Because that's what they thought would be the future of this partnership. And that just went away overnight. And I think for Disney, they just have to. They're kind of back to square one in terms of thinking about how they're going to live in this AI world now that they're main partner in Silicon Valley has basically done a 180 and pulled back.

Jessica Mendoza (16:35)

So if OpenAI was sort of on the cutting edge of this and now they're pulling out, what does that mean for AI generated video?

Berber Jin (16:43)

It's not like the whole world of AI video generation tools is dead, but it definitely kind of reshuffles the playing field a bit. And it's just like raising these questions again of like, how soon is this technology coming? Who now is going to be bringing this technology to us, if not OpenAI and what's our strategy now for making sure that we are prepared for that world?

Jessica Mendoza (17:07)

Meanwhile, Berber says OpenAI is now all hands on deck building a super app. It would combine ChatGPT with an AI browser and the company's coding tool, Codex. It's interesting, though, it sounds like with this pivot, OpenAI and Anthropic are going to be focusing on kind of the same things, which is clarifying their core business models. So are these two rivals essentially just going to be walking in the same direction, doubling down on a very similar suite of products?

Berber Jin (17:36)

The short answer is yes. The money now is in these agentic tools, specifically agentic coding, and that's a huge focus area for them. ChatGPT is still a much larger business than the consumer version of Claude, and so that's the advantage that OpenAI has. But right now they are both very actively battling for the same set of customers. And I think compared to a year ago, they were obviously still competing, but they were focused on different areas of the AI market.

Jessica Mendoza (18:12)

But OpenAI is still trying to find ways to differentiate itself from its rivals. Last week, the company announced that it's purchasing a popular video podcast about Silicon Valley, which executives hope will help them shape the narrative around the company. They've also said that the show will remain editorially independent, and investors seem excited about the direction OpenAI is going. The startup recently closed a historic funding round of $122 billion, so OpenAI is going strong. With that said, what do you think this moment means for the company at

Berber Jin (18:48)

the level of OpenAI's identity? I think it kind of represents the death of a vision that Sam Altman had for OpenAI that was kind of about using AI, not just as like a basic productivity tool, but to change the way people interacted with technology. And specifically AI is an enabler of creativity.

Jessica Mendoza (19:13)

Are we just generally having to reorient on the promise that we, the consumer, have been told about how amazing and fun this tech is going to be, and actually we're just going to be seeing it at work all the time?

Berber Jin (19:26)

Yeah, I think it's definitely like this weird moment where the kind of vision that people have of AI is actually a little bit different than how these companies want us to use these tools. I think being able to create a bot that's able to monitor your inbox and schedule appointments for you is very different than being able to conjure up, like, a fantastical world of, like, woolly mammoths trekking across a snowy meadow.

Jessica Mendoza (20:06)

That's all for today. Tuesday, April 7th. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Keech Hagee and Jessica Tuchel. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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