OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro

Taylor Hill/FilmMagic; Alberto Rodriguez/Penske Media/Getty Images

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When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down Sora, the company’s AI video generation tool, he called former Disney CEO Bob Iger to give him a heads up.

Iger was the one who spearheaded the partnership, which would have given Sora access to hundreds of Disney characters, and with the entertainment company investing $1 billion in the AI giant. With OpenAI getting out of the video generation business, the Disney deal was toast before it even officially kicked off.

“I get it,” Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro told Altman, the OpenAI CEO recalled in his first interview after the decision was made. “It’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work,” Altman said.

Altman spoke to journalist Laurie Segall for her new Mostly Human podcast, and while topics covered included the full spectrum of excitement and concerns around artificial intelligence, it is Sora and Disney that will likely be of most interest to Hollywood.

And Altman left the door open to a future deal.

“I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that,” Altman said. “But we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.”

The decision was a close one, he said, mentioning that they had debated simply folding Sora into ChatGPT.

“We were thinking about other versions of keeping it before the computer crunch came, we were talking about putting it into the ChatGPT app, really focusing on generation and creativity,” Altman said. “But one thing that we had realized is that to succeed with it as the product was currently conceptualized in this way, you could watch a lot of videos, that would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn’t want to make.”

Indeed, Altman framed the decision to shutter Sora as about prioritizing increasingly scarce resources: “It’s always about compute,” he said.

“We have a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects,” he added. “In fact, this was the original thing happened with GPT3. We had a whole portfolio of bets at the time, a lot of them were working well. We shut down many projects that were working well, like robotics, so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing.”

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