In his first interview post Sora shutdown, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reveals he gave Disney’s former and current CEOs Bob Iger and Josh D’Amaro a heads up prior to the decision and that the companies remain in discussions about collaborating in the future.
In December, Disney struck a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to bring more than 200 of its characters to the platform to create short AI-generated videos for social media, as well as use for ChatGPT’s image-generation platform. Disney was also set to host a series of curated Sora-generated videos on Disney+. But on March 24, OpenAI made the surprise decision to shut the platform down as it shifted its resources elsewhere.
“We have a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects. In fact, this was the original thing happened with GPT3. We had a whole portfolio of bets at the time. A lot of them were working well,” Altman told the Mostly Human podcast in an interview. “We shut down many projects that were working well like robotics which we mentioned so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing that we said okay there’s a very important thing happening. I did not expect 3 or 6 months ago to be at this point we’re at now where something very big and important is about to happen again with this next generation of models and the agents they they can power.”
Disney subsequently confirmed the partnership was over, adding that it respected the decision, appreciated the “constructive collaboration” and would “continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.”
“Disney is an amazing company all around and the very first thing that the new Disney CEO Josh said to me was like, ‘I get it’,” Altman added. “But it’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work. There are many hard parts about being a CEO that you don’t get sympathy for understandably, but one of them is like you have to make a lot of like very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that because they’re not the most important thing.”
A source familiar with the original agreement told TheWrap that alongside the licensing deal, Disney agreed to become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees. Those deals are now being reevaluated.
“I love Sora, I love generative videos and I love our partnership with Disney and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing and we can help with that. But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies,” he added. “It’s always about compute.”
Sora, which first launched in 2024, had over 1 million downloads in less than five days and would release an updated version at the end of September.
But the text-to-video model quickly raised copyright concerns in Hollywood, prompting pushback from the Motion Picture Association, unions like SAG-AFTRA and A-list stars like Bryan Cranston, among others.Altman would later update Sora’s copyright controls and offer monetization in the app for creators to help address Hollywood’s concerns.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is pivoting to productivity tools for enterprise and individual users. The company has said it would combine the ChatGPT desktop app, coding tool Codex and browser into a super app.
It also comes on the heels of OpenAI announcing a $110 billion investment at a $730 billion pre-money valuation last month, which includes $30 billion from SoftBank, $30 billion from Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon. The Journal notes OpenAI could consider a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.
