{"id":360721,"date":"2026-04-02T19:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T19:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360721\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T19:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T19:26:08","slug":"openai-still-talking-to-disney-about-a-deal-after-sora-shutdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/360721\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Still Talking to Disney About a Deal After Sora Shutdown"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen OpenAI<\/a> CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down<\/a> Sora, the company\u2019s AI<\/a> video generation tool, he called former Disney<\/a> CEO Bob Iger to give him a heads up.<\/p>\n

\n\tIger was the one who spearheaded the partnership<\/a>, which would have given Sora access to hundreds of Disney characters, and with the entertainment company investing $1 billion in the AI giant. With OpenAI getting out of the video generation business, the Disney deal was toast before it even officially kicked off.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI get it,\u201d Disney CEO Josh D\u2019Amaro told Altman, the OpenAI CEO recalled in his first interview after the decision was made. \u201cIt\u2019s super sad always to disappoint a partner or users or a team, all of which are doing incredible work,\u201d Altman said.<\/p>\n

\n\tAltman spoke to journalist Laurie Segall <\/a>for her new Mostly Human podcast, and while topics covered included the full spectrum of excitement and concerns around artificial intelligence, it is Sora and Disney that will likely be of most interest to Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd Altman left the door open to a future deal.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we\u2019re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that,\u201d Altman said. \u201cBut we need to concentrate our compute and our product capacity into these next generation of automated researchers and companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney, in a statement last week, said that \u201cwe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA source familiar with the matter says that Disney\u2019s wide-ranging deal with OpenAI would have included the company becoming a major customer of the AI giant, using its APIs to develop new tools, and to deploy ChatGPT enterprise-wide for its employees. With the deal not proceeding, the other elements are being reevaluated.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe decision was a close one, he said, mentioning that they had debated simply folding Sora into ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe were thinking about other versions of keeping it before the computer crunch came, we were talking about putting it into the ChatGPT app, really focusing on generation and creativity,\u201d Altman said. \u201cBut one thing that we had realized is that to succeed with it as the product was currently conceptualized in this way, you could watch a lot of videos, that would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn\u2019t want to make.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIndeed, Altman framed the decision to shutter Sora as about prioritizing increasingly scarce resources: \u201cIt\u2019s always about compute,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe have a few times in our history realized something really important is working or about to work so well that we have to stop a bunch of other projects,\u201d he added. \u201cIn fact, this was the original thing happened with GPT3. We had a whole portfolio of bets at the time, a lot of them were working well. We shut down many projects that were working well, like robotics, so that we could concentrate our compute, our researchers, our effort into this thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made the decision to shut down Sora, the company\u2019s AI video generation tool,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,2398,111,139,69,620,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-360721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-disney","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-openai","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}