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Remember when OpenAI launched Sora and everyone lost their minds? AI-generated video. Type a sentence, get a movie clip. It felt like the future had arrived overnight.
Well, OpenAI just pulled the plug on it.
On March 24th, OpenAI announced they're shutting down Sora completely. The iOS app, the website, the API for developers. All of it. Gone.
Here's the wild part: it was costing OpenAI up to $15 million per day in computing power. And the total revenue it generated over its entire lifetime? $2.1 million. Not per day. Not per month. Total. Ever. That's a money bonfire that would make even Silicon Valley blush.
The user numbers tell the same story. Sora peaked at about a million users after launch, then quickly dropped below 500,000. For a product backed by the most talked-about AI company on the planet, that's a flop.
But the real drama is what happened behind the scenes.
Disney had committed $1 billion to partner with OpenAI on Sora. A billion dollars. And according to reports, Disney found out Sora was being shut down less than an hour before the public announcement. The deal died on the spot.
So why did Sam Altman make the call? Strategy. While OpenAI was pouring resources into making AI videos work, their competitor Anthropic was quietly winning over the developers and businesses that actually pay money. Claude Code (the tool that helps people write software) was eating OpenAI's lunch in the enterprise market. Altman looked at the numbers and decided: stop burning cash on cool demos, start winning the customers that matter.
What this means for you: AI video generation isn't dead. You can still create videos with Sora through ChatGPT if you're a paying subscriber. But the standalone product is gone. The bigger lesson? Even the biggest companies in AI can't make everything work. Not every shiny new AI feature is going to stick around. Before you build your workflow around a specific AI tool, make sure it has a real business model behind it, not just hype.
Prompt of the Day
The "Tool Audit" prompt:
I currently use these AI tools in my daily workflow:
[List your tools - ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, etc.]
For each tool, help me evaluate:
1. What would I lose if it shut down tomorrow?
2. Is there a backup tool that does the same thing?
3. Am I paying for features I don't actually use?
4. What's the ONE tool I'd keep if I could only keep one?
Give me a simple recommendation: keep, replace, or cancel for each.
We just watched a major AI product disappear overnight. This prompt helps you make sure you're not over-invested in any single tool.
Try it today --> Run this audit on your current AI subscriptions. You might save some money.