recalibrate

OpenAI Sora has closed. His generative video AI that he has proudly shown on numerous occasions and which earned him a juicy $1 billion deal with Disney it no longer exists. The news fell like a bomb a few hours ago followed by the withdrawal of that billion-dollar Disney investment. Although there are those who point out that OpenAI is in trouble, those problems are not so much economic as lack of direction, and closing Sora seems only a step backwards in the long-distance race of OpenAI and AI. Go public this year and start harvesting after everything planted. In short. It’s the news of the day. Less than a year and a half after launching it, OpenAI says goodbye to Sora. In his day (February 2024, how time flies) we were amazed at what this generative AI could do. It was just 60 seconds of video and had some huge flaws, but it was one more step in the artificial intelligence race that positioned OpenAI at the forefront of the industry. Then other competing models arrived, culminating with a Seedance 2.0 that has consumed the entire Internet to plagiarize absolutely anything. Like all the others, wow. Issues. But although striking, Sora was a tool that didn’t seem to add up. While other services have integrated their generative AI models within an ecosystem or applications (the aforementioned Seedance 2.0 in suites AI or in the video editor CapCutfor example), Sora was there, away. The aforementioned contract with Disney was worth it, but it did not seem to be part of something larger, of a “creative suite” (if generative AI can be classified as such). He simply existed, and the worst thing was that others were passing him on the right. Eggs in many baskets. It was, in short, another product of an OpenAI that had eggs in many baskets. It was reaching dizzying numbers in different rounds of financing, setting up data centers, buying a lot from NVIDIA (depending a lot on NVIDIA, too) and launching products like crazy. OpenAI wanted to touch all the keys: And there are some other products, as well as a super app to integrate all that that was not being integrated into other sites. The philosophy was simple: if we are in everything, something will work, but the result has been the opposite and, as my colleague Javier Pastor said a few days ago, wanting to be the bride at the wedding and the dead man at the funeral It is having consequences. The competition tightens. While OpenAI diversified and allocated resources to touch all suits, Anthropic (which is not just a rival, it is a public enemy) was dedicated to two things. It’s not that Anthropic doesn’t have a browser or a video generator: it’s that they don’t even have an image generator. In exchange, what they do have They are functional, precise models and that they do things very well, especially in the field of amateur development with the vibe coding. Focusing on one thing and doing it very well is something that the market is seeing valueto the point that Anthropic is raising a lot of money in different recent financing rounds. In a short time, it has gone from being valued at 183,000 million to arrive up to 380,000 million, and that has had all the fuss with the United States government and the loss of contract with the Department of Defense. Money, too. And money moves everything, and while ChatGPT sweeps the consumer segment with more than 2.5 billion daily queries, you have to wonder how many paying users there are. Where the money really is, which is in business use, Anthropic controls the market with 32% compared to OpenAI’s 25%. And in programming, the distance is astronomical: 42% compared to 21%. In fact, OpenAI has seen how your business share has fallen from 50% in 2023 to just 25% today. As we say, this is where the greatest potential for growth and commercial performance is, and OpenAI is realizing that being focused on so many fields has caused them to be distracted. Or what is the same: they have covered more than they could bite off. Public company. The closure of Sora responds to a multitude of factors, but in the background there is something more important. NVIDIA has already said that the millionaire mega-rounds are overand it has done so just before the expected IPO of both OpenAI and Anthropic. When both go on the stock market, they will have to face another financing model. They will need products that generate profits to attract investors to buy shares, and right now, the one that is best positioned is Anthropic. OpenAI has a lot, but nothing makes it complete. Anthropic has less, but it is very efficient, and getting rid of Sora seems like a move to release ballast before becoming a “public” company (in the American concept). They have to focus their shooting, focus their teams (something they themselves have recognized) and stop wanting to be too much at once without having a clear strategy. Because they are becoming another example of being a pioneer It doesn’t always mean you’re the best. and that, if you don’t get your act together, competitors who have a clearer roadmap will eat your toast. Only time will tell if the strategy works, but at the rate things are going, it won’t take too long to find out. In Xataka | The worrying thing is not that AI is going to take your job in the future: it’s that it is preventing you from finding one now