Sora Is Dead. Export Your Work Now.
OpenAI announced tonight that it is shutting down the Sora app and exiting AI video generation entirely. ChatGPT will also stop generating video from text prompts. The Disney deal, which included licensing more than 200 characters and a planned $1 billion investment, is dead with it. OpenAI says the Sora research team will refocus on robotics, but the real driver is cost: the company is trimming expensive consumer products ahead of an expected IPO. For anyone who built workflows around Sora, the priority is immediate. Get your videos and assets off the platform before shutdown timelines are confirmed. For the full story, see our breaking News coverage.
DeepBrain AI Moves From Static Avatars to Conversational Video Agents
DeepBrain AI, the Palo Alto-based avatar platform, has launched what it calls AI Video Agents for enterprise customers. The shift is from one-way video, where an AI avatar delivers a scripted message, to two-way interaction, where the avatar listens, responds and adapts in real time. The company says the technology is already deployed with SAP, Shinhan Bank and Samsung Securities across customer service, internal training and knowledge management. For anyone tracking where AI video meets actual business revenue, this is worth noting. The use case isn’t content creation. It’s operational: replacing help desks, onboarding sessions and customer support workflows with interactive video avatars that scale without headcount.
OpenAI Plans to Nearly Double Its Workforce by Year End
The Financial Times reports that OpenAI intends to expand from roughly 4,500 employees to around 8,000 by the end of 2026, hiring across product, engineering, research, sales and what it describes as technical ambassadorship. In light of tonight’s Sora shutdown, this hiring spree looks different. The growth in sales and enterprise functions now points squarely at text, code and business tools, not creative products. According to Ramp’s AI Index, businesses are now 70% more likely to choose Anthropic over OpenAI when purchasing AI tools for the first time. OpenAI’s response is to put people on the ground selling enterprise contracts for the products it’s keeping, not the ones it just killed. The message to the AI video industry is hard to miss: OpenAI has decided that video generation isn’t worth the compute.
