Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, took to X yesterday to say something that everybody was already thinking: OpenAI made a huge mistake with the launch of Sora.
we significantly underestimated demand for sora; it is going to take awhile to get everyone access.
— Sam Altman (@sama) December 10, 2024
trying to figure out how to do it as fast as possible!
In Altman’s words, “We significantly underestimated demand for Sora.”
Thousands of OpenAI users watched the company’s live announcement of Sora yesterday, popped over to the new Sora.com, and tried to sign in.
Rather than finding a powerful AI video generation tool, they got a maddening message saying that Sora account creation was not possible due to high demand.
That stings, given that millions of people are already paying $20 per month for a ChatGPT Plus subscription.
It probably hurt even more, though, for OpenAI Pro users. Just last week, the company launched a $200 per month Pro tier for ChatGPT, aimed at the heaviest users in academia, business, and research.
Even those extremely well-heeled users couldn’t get basic access to the new AI video…
What Happened
What’s going on? It appears that OpenAI rolled Sora out too fast, and to too many people.
Instead of starting with a selected group and doing a slow rollout (starting with Pro users, for example), OpenAI was foolhardy enough to launch the product to every ChatGPT Plus subscriber all at once.
They probably thought they could handle the demand. Clearly, they were wrong.
It’s surprising that OpenAI would make such a mistake. After all, they’re the poster child for startlingly successful product launches.
When the company launched ChatGPT two years ago, it was also a surprise, runaway success. OpenAI had to scramble to accommodate a record-setting influx of over 100 million new users in less than 3 months.
You’d think they would’ve learned from their past mistakes. Apparently not.
Now, OpenAI is furiously working to play catch-up, and to avoid alienating the people it just asked to fork over $2,400 per year for access to a service that doesn’t yet practically exist.
Fittingly, the rare Sora users who actually got access to the platform immediately started using it to troll Sam Altman.
have a seat, sam pic.twitter.com/tINKe6nf0J
— 💺 (@patience_cave) December 10, 2024
A hilarious set of videos — created by Sora, of course — showing stressed-out OpenAI engineers and a literal “hot seat” for Altman circulated on X after he made his announcement.
Masters of Hype
Ultimately, an overwhelming demand for services is a good problem to have — for OpenAI anyway, if not for users.
Sora’s rollout shows yet again how the company has mastered the AI hype cycle, bending it to Altman’s will.
As an AI expert who has tested pretty much every openly available AI video generator on the market, Sora doesn’t look that impressive to me yet, when compared to similar offerings from Luma and Runway.
I’m sure it will improve. But at the moment, people are tripping over themselves to try out a product other companies have been offering— at least at technical level — for months now.
The big difference is that Luma and Runway never went mega-viral. The media, and legions of tech bros, don’t hang on their CEOs’ every word. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the industry who can even name the people behind these companies.
The wild success of Sora — and ultimately of OpenAI — likely has more to do with Altman taking over as the proto-Steve Jobs and creating his own wildly impactful, frenzy-inducing flavor of live product demo than with the company’s tech itself.
Of course, I wouldn’t know — I haven’t gotten access to Sora yet!
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