AedelonA $20/month user costs OpenAI $65 in compute. AI video is a money furnace
https://aedelon777.substack.com/p/i-did-the-math-on-sora-ai-video-is
Could OpenAI have released a local paid version, instead of shutting down Sora? Maybe. A lot of users have beefy machines.
Full quality Sora yeah probably needs serious hardware. distilled version on a 4090 though? maybe. danjl earlier in this thread made a solid case for just distributing the weights and letting people run locally. the SD/ComfyUI crowd already does this daily. OpenAI won't because deepfakes. they already had a mess WITH server-side moderation. open weights with zero moderation, good luck with that PR.
The economics work if you generate the video locally, using your own compute and a pretrained model provided for a fee. The compute bit is the expensive part. Local users could trade time for money. They just don't have a business or security model that allows them to distribute the model for people to use locally. Sure, you might need to wait all night for 10 seconds of video generated on your 4090, but you could do it, and folks might even pay for the privilege of using the pretrained model. Licensing for local compute might even pay back the cost of training the model with enough time and users.
This is the model that makes sense to me and I'm surprised nobody at OpenAI pursued it. Yeah a 4090 would take hours for 10 seconds of video, but people already do this. The SD/ComfyUI crowd runs overnight batch generations on consumer GPUs and doesn't care about latency.
Charge for model access, let users burn their own power. Basically Llama but for video (pun intended).
The reason it won't come from OpenAI is the deepfake thing. Distribute the weights and you lose all moderation. Sora already had a deepfake disaster WITH server-side controls. Without any? Good luck.
But yeah, for someone willing to go open-weights, there's a real business there.Opus 4.6Étendue
The title is misleading. It should be read as “Some $20/month users who made videos on Sora costed OpenAI $65 in compute.”
OpenAI is most definitely in a position to be profitable. They are spending less than a third of their revenue on compute (all infrastructure costs combined).
Yeah fair, the $65 is for someone cranking out 50 clips/month. Most users were probably doing 5-10, so more like $6.50-$13 in compute. That's fine at $20/month.
Doesn't change the bigger picture much though. OpenAI's at $25B annualized revenue and still projecting $14B in losses for 2026. Sora wasn't the only problem, just the most obvious one.
This seems to have a healthy helping of AI editing help (if not fully generated by AI). The links don't quite go to the sources that they should and there's a lot of AI-isms.
Anyways, the calculation for the costs seem crazy high (and are pulled from an ft article). In particular they are based off a calculation that assumes Sora videos take 10 min to generate (which seems simply wrong; I've personally generated Sora videos that take less than 10 min to return fully formed), fully saturate 4 H200s at once (this seems wrong with batching; I would assume they're batching a lot of tokens together per forward pass), and, crucially, that OpenAI is paying full spot, end-user pricing for an H200 (at $2 an hour). As an individual, I can rent an H200 for $2 an hour on e.g. vast.ai (and sometimes even cheaper than that!). There is absolutely no way OpenAI is spending anywhere near that number.
I also have no idea where the Appfigures $2.1 million comes from. As far as I can tell it doesn't exist at all in the linked website.
I don't really trust the numbers here.
Sorry, I wrote wrong link for several source.
1. Appfigures $2.1M = https://appfigures.com/reports/app-profile/338340235920
2. Watermark bypass = https://www.404media.co/sora-2-watermark-removers-flood-the-...
3. Goldman Sachs $410B = https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
