Katie Notopoulos Bids Farewell to Sora: ‘You Were Too Beautiful and Stupid for This World’

Katie Notopoulos, my favorite Sora user, at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but available via News+):

Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the novelty had worn off. I rarely opened the app after the second week.

This was, I imagine, a problem: making videos of yourself is fun, but watching videos that strangers make of themselves is not fun. The idea of a social feed of AI-generated videos is simply not something that people are interested in. Around the same time, Meta also tried this with an app of AI videos, and it was even more boring.

It’s hard to see how anyone thought Sora would have staying power, or could ever justify the apparently exorbitant cost of running it. OpenAI burned a ton of money on what was effectively a stunt.

OpenAI doesn’t appear to be a well-oiled machine at the moment.

★ Thursday, 26 March 2026