I am convinced at this point that Sora is an unfinished mess and the only reason they pushed it out the door is because they needed money.

Didn’t Sammy go grifting in the UAE shortly after?

And then two of their developers alluded that it’s unfinished and said it won’t be released anytime soon, just for their CTO to shut them down two days later and saying, No, no, it’s totally coming later this year.

They could’ve made it do something cool and novel, like a cat riding a pink unicorn fighting dragons. Or probably not, because it can’t do that, so instead they made it their selling point how good it can fake reality during an already juicy election season and applauded themselves for it.

This linked interview of Brian Merchant by Adam Conover is great. I highly recommend watching the whole thing.

For example, here is Adam, decribing the actual reasons why striking writers were concerned about AI, followed by Brian explaining how Sam Altman et al hype up the existential risk they themselves claim to be creating, just so they can sell themselves as the solution. Lots of really edifying stuff in this interview.

I haven’t seen any numbers on how much Sora cost to train, nor how much it costs to run- I can’t help but believe it’s painfully high.

I’ve rather been enjoying following tante’s writings lately, and just saw this: https://tante.cc/2024/03/18/5115/

(also I wanted to use the phrase “tech-critical writings” and then didn’t because fucking GCs (no, not the memory kind) fucked up the term reference (fucking aaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhh))