In his first interview since OpenAI shut down Sora, Sam Altman said he warned Disney's Bob Iger and Josh D'Amaro before the decision and that the two companies are still discussing ways to work together.
The December deal, worth $1 billion, would have brought more than 200 Disney characters to Sora and ChatGPT's image tools and put curated Sora videos on Disney+. OpenAI closed Sora on March 24, and Disney then confirmed the partnership was over. A source told TheWrap that Disney had also agreed to become a major OpenAI customer, building on its APIs for Disney+ and rolling out ChatGPT to staff, and that those arrangements are now being reconsidered.
On the Mostly Human podcast, Altman described the closure as a question of compute: OpenAI is freeing resources for a coming generation of models and agents, much as it once dropped robotics to focus on GPT-3. He said D'Amaro told him he understood, while calling it painful to let a partner down.
Sora passed a million downloads within five days of launch but drew copyright complaints from the MPA, SAG-AFTRA and actors such as Bryan Cranston. The Wall Street Journal has reported that OpenAI is shifting toward productivity tools, after a $110 billion funding round.
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