OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally told Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro about the decision to shutdown video generator Sora, just a few months after the two companies had signed a $1 billion deal.

Sam Altman Told Josh D’Amaro About Sora Shutdown

Altman said on iHeartPodcasts’ Mostly Human that he called D’Amaro to give him the news.

“The very first thing that the new Disney CEO Josh said to me, and I felt, like, terrible… He’s like, ‘I get it.’ But it’s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work.”

Altman added, “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.”

He explained that OpenAI decided to close Sora so they could “concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.”

“There are like many hard parts about being a CEO that you don’t get sympathy for,” Altman said, “but one of them is, like, you have to like make a lot of like very tough resourcing calls and a lot of good things get caught up in that because they’re not the most important thing.”

Under the Disney x OpenAI agreement, over 200 Disney characters were going to become available for use in Sora and some short-form video content would even stream on Disney+. They never had the opportunity to launch these features, however.

Disney released this statement when the Sora news broke:

As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere. We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators.

They reportedly withdrew their $1 billion investment but are still evaluating a partnership with OpenAI.

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