Roland Meyer

OpenAI's sudden discontinuation of its video model #Sora, just a few months after a spectacular deal with Disney, shows just how little these AI companies care about their so-called products. AI video apps, to quote @hito Steyerl, are «onboarding tools» — their purpose is more ideological than commercial.

Rather than offering revenue-generating services (OpenAI is burning money with every single Sora generated clip), these apps are designed to accustom us to a world in which so-called generative AI seems inevitable — and to provide investors with impressive demonstrations of these models' performance.

In other words, companies like OpenAI do not develop consumer products; they merely launch demos that can be retracted once they have fulfilled their purpose. Never mind that, in the meantime, they are flooding our media landscape with a deluge of #slop and destroying entire cultural sectors in the process.

6:08amWeb
Show threadbureauxx12h ago

@bildoperationen @hito

ist halt wie ein grosshandel. disney als kunde und die einzel kunden bei disney..

Show threaddvd12h ago
@bildoperationen @hito thanks for you thought. Maybe there should be more caution in calling this as the beginning of AI bubble burst, what a few are doing. this might be as you say just the discontinuation leading towards a next move. Like they need more infrastructure for AI assisted war machine.
Show threadJan11h ago
@bildoperationen @hito
Thanks to the investors for letting us burn your money, showing the danger of ai generated fake movies to everyone /s
Show threadhito11h ago
@bildoperationen few thoughts. 1.we are past "onboarding" .the military, is on board; the boat is afloat, AI bubble not bursting bc war economy. 2. what this means for image generators is unclear yet. one cautious guess: one part (slopaganda etc) will just get more normalised. about another part (small custom made models) we just dont know yet.
Show threadRoland Meyer10h ago
@hito Thank you! Totally agree, although I'd see «onboarding» as a continuous process. Academia is still in the middle of it, and although the war machine is the big prize, the tech companies are also highly interested in education and universities, because it easily scales and provides secure revenue once the institutions are on board (and they are eager to get on board)
Show threadhito10h ago
@bildoperationen absolutely. they will just have to do it without meme gadgets this time.
Show threadRoland Meyer10h ago
@hito That might be a main reason OpenAI discontinues Sora and focuses on ChatGPT - AI video generation ist not only extremely expensive, it's also hard to sell as anything else than a gadget, at least when you're aiming at government contracts (first, they tried to promote it as decisive step to a «world model», but I never heard about that one again)
Show threadhito4h ago
@bildoperationen if you look at fine print it’s there: Sora only used now to generate training data (——“world model”, simulated drone flights, “physics”)
Show threadRoland Meyer2h ago
@hito That'd be interesting, do you have any sources on how this might continue and/or is already in use? I always thought it was more of a unfulfilled promise, given all the physical inconsistencies and instabilities of AI video
Show threadPeet Tetteroo9h ago

@bildoperationen @hito

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Show threadWatchful Citizen8h ago
@bildoperationen @hito honestly this was totally reasonable. Sora was far behind competitors. And they wanted to focus on Enterprise. I kinda get they letting go. I don't see the value of video generation past the hype
Show threadKoen Hufkens, PhD8h ago

@bildoperationen @hito IMO not only this, the whole deal is sort of double dipping. First you steal the IP, which you then sell back to the original owner (to protect this asset - or use it).

I'm pretty sure that Disney could have generated a good enough model for their own purposes (Disney has historically been a big contributor to the computer vision research space). But given their shark-like IP protection they were put under the gun.

Show threadCM Thiede6h ago
@bildoperationen @hito this shit is all going to fall on its head in short order. The US can't compete with the data trove China has with their all encompassing WeChat app sucking up all data points on everyone all at once. Unless these Silicon Demigods get over themselves and merge, or the US goes full fascist and forces a US surveillance superApp on the public, it's just assholes playing with wealth transfer machines.
Show threadToni Aittoniemi5h ago
@bildoperationen @hito It’s reality manufacturing to benefit the Epstein Class.