The 30 second story
Picture a restaurant owner who spent months perfecting a new dish, only to pull it from the menu on opening night because the ingredients cost more than customers will pay. OpenAI did exactly this with Sora, its video-making tool that could turn text into short films. The company killed Sora, reversed plans to add video generation to ChatGPT, and scrapped a £800 million deal with Disney, all in a single day. OpenAI then raised another £8 billion from investors, bringing their total funding to nearly £100 billion.
Why it matters
This shows how fast AI companies change direction when the numbers don’t work. OpenAI is under massive pressure to turn a profit after years of burning through investor money. When a feature costs more to run than it brings in, it gets cut, no matter how impressive it looks in demos. The speed of this decision matters because OpenAI makes the tools that many other AI products depend on. When they pivot this hard, it ripples through every business using their technology. Companies building automation around OpenAI’s video capabilities now need new plans.
What this means for your business
- AI features you rely on can vanish overnight if they become too expensive for the company to maintain
- Building automation around cutting-edge AI capabilities carries real risk of sudden changes or cancellations
- The AI companies with the deepest pockets are making decisions based on profit, not innovation, which means more stability around proven tools
- Video generation remains expensive and unreliable for business use, despite the impressive demos