OpenAI on Tuesday said it would what with its once viral AI video appSora, 176 days (or about 6 months) after its initial release. It boldly asked this question: Are we indeed do you need this? There was once a right answer. No, no, we don’t.
This is the largest, community project executed by OpenAI. While it shows a lack of confidence in the news-generating side of things, I don’t think it’s a sign that the AI industry is collapsing. (Sorry if that’s what you were expecting.) The real story is depth.
If OpenAI wanted to build the best AI video tool or invent a new form of social media, it would be too. But Sora is an odd duck. The second-generation model is impressive, holding a slot on CNET’s list of AI video tools. But the social media app is weird. Part AI, part social media, it’s all fake.
Whatever Sora was meant to be, it didn’t live up to the dream. But there’s still a lot to learn from Sora’s rapid rise and sudden death.
There’s always a small chance that OpenAI will change its mind — just look at Meta, itself he pulled the plug and woke up the Metaverse in two days. But I think the company — and all of us who have to live in this age of AI — will be better off if it continues. Here is the reason.
Sora was never the end of OpenAI
Here’s the dirty secret of productive media: It’s incredibly expensive. It takes a lot of engineering work to build a model that doesn’t spit out embarrassing side effects. So it costs before it is released. As such, it requires more computation to render complex videos and images compared to simple text. Moreover, it is contradictory. You’ll probably get sued for copyright infringement at some point, but that’s nothing new. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’ copyrights in training and using its AI programs.)
It’s not a game you want to be in unless you go all in. OpenAI had two ways it could go down with Sora: Full social media or full AI video. It didn’t either. OpenAI didn’t get into Sora the way it is with ChatGPT.
The company did not invest the resources it needed to transform its video model into a modern, state-of-the-art tool. Sora 2 had impressive sound and graphics, of course. But you couldn’t edit your videos easily. Its storytelling device never lived up to my expectations, and I’m no expert. At the time, Google built a great editing system for its AI tools, called Flow, and Adobe incorporated its AI into its existing industry-standard editing software. Sora 2, the model, is great, but it was limited where it lived within the app and website.
So if Sora wasn’t going to be a professional tool, at least not without a lot of work, then its main purpose was to create memes. It was strange that OpenAI was willingly entering the telecommunications business. The new AI video model, of course, made sense. But using social media is a serious job that comes with many responsibilities, difficult choices and ethics. Content moderation alone is a juggernaut that should have sunk the Meta more than once. (And a New Mexico judge hit Meta with $375 million in penalties for its failure to balance and protect less than an hour after the Sora news broke Tuesday.) Sam Altman hasn’t shown any interest in becoming Mark Zuckerberg’s AI version.
(Meta actually released an AI video app shortly before OpenAI did, called Vibes. You probably didn’t know this because no one cared.)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at BlackRock’s 2026 infrastructure conference in March 2026.
Sora never developed a true social personality. There were no great moments of cultural success. It didn’t have the dance moves of TikTok or the legacy of Instagram, for example. No brands pay for ads or popular creators draw new users. OpenAI was probably losing a lot of money just to keep the app running. We can make memes without AI and, frankly, the last thing we need is AI regression to navigate.
It wasn’t until OpenAI struck a $1 billion deal with Disney that it seemed like Sora might have been thrown a lifeline. If OpenAI hadn’t shut down Sora, I’d bet that Disney might have given Sora the power it needed. The ability to legally create videos with visible characters would attract new users and renew fan motivation. But the world isn’t missing out on much other than the possibility of more Spider-Man-themed flashbacks.
Instead, pulling the plug on Sora gives OpenAI the opportunity to pursue that most elusive goal of tech companies: AI that’s truly useful.
So what is the conclusion?
While the latter part of 2025 was about AI photography and video tools, 2026 is about AI doing things, especially at work: agent AI, coding agents, nails and robots.
Anthropic started the race this year with its Claude Code and Cowork advanced tools proving that AI can be an important workplace tool. OpenAI released Codex to compete but Anthropic’s popularity and new user registrations have been on the rise. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of applications, reportedly told employees earlier this month that it would cut back on “side applications” to focus on other business tools. In comparison, meme AI videos certainly don’t seem like a priority.
In fact, these business-oriented tools are very attractive to customers who may pay OpenAI real money for their AI services. Whatever OpenAI’s actual financial situation is, I think they want that business. It also proves that the company is more than just the first to take productive AI to the next level. It can create more value than information full of errors, sycophantic pseudo-Therapists and horrors that are AI’s love friends.
Everyone likes to talk about the AI industry moving fast, breaking things and asking for forgiveness later, etc. But if one of the things that kills the AI industry is the useless stuff that’s been built over the years, I think we’ll all be better off for it.
I hope Sora’s death inspires us to have a deeper conversation about ourselves actually we need our AI tools to do it. Because it’s not AI memes. Not many other things that AI companies want you to believe. The first step to removing useless AI — from our smartphones, artwork and culture — is to realize that we don’t need it.
