This decision of theirs might be a signal of where frontier AI is actually heading Sora was impressive, no doubt, but even a short near to 10-second video could cost around $1+ to generate internally, while API pricing ranged roughly from $0.10 to $0.50 per second depending on quality . Now scale that to millions of users, and it becomes clear why video is a compute-heavy frontier. Even OpenAI reportedly shut Sora down partly due to high computational costs and a need to reallocate resources to more scalable products like coding tools and enterprise AI. Meanwhile, Right now, with just text plus code interfaces, people are Automating workflows, Building agents that execute multi-step tasks and replacing parts of knowledge work I see it as a transfer of cognitive labour, and honestly, this scales much better. Text and code are cheaper to run, easier to verify, and are more directly useful in business workflows So if you’re an AI company with limited compute, the decision becomes obvious: Do you spend it on visually impressive outputs, or on systems that actually can see some productive work and a minimal 2% growth ( which is massive in big numbers) It looks like we’re entering a phase where: Video = demo layer (high cost, low reliability, unclear ROI) Text/code/agents = execution layer (low cost, high utility, immediate ROI) Sora shutting down might be the first clear sign that the industry is prioritizing utility intelligence over impressive visual generation :)) submitted by /u/ocean_protocol
Originally posted by u/ocean_protocol on r/ArtificialInteligence