Transcription
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is a master at announcing big, headline-grabbing deals that ultimately amount to nothing. Everything from the fake Stargate Argentina announcement to the $100 billion investment from Nvidia, which never happened.
The focus of today's video is a partnership OpenAI announced with Disney late last year. On December 11th, 2025, the two companies announced what they called a landmark agreement to bring beloved characters from across Disney's brands to Sora. If you're not familiar, last year, OpenAI launched an app called Sora, which allows users to generate AI videos. It has a TikTok-style endless feed where you can view other users' AI-generated videos. OpenAI incurred billions of dollars of computing costs to operate Sora and generated almost no revenue in return. As part of the partnership with Disney, Sora users would be able to pay a fee to create AI-generated videos using Disney's characters such as Star Wars and Marvel. OpenAI announced that as part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment into OpenAI and receive warrants to purchase additional equity. Notice that OpenAI always uses definitive language. They didn't say Disney might make a $1 billion investment or that they plan to make a $1 billion investment. Disney will make a $1 billion investment. The wording implies that this agreement is set in stone, and we know that OpenAI needs all the money it can get. As it turns out, this investment from Disney never happened and is never going to happen.
On March 24th, 2026, OpenAI announced it will shut down its Sora app. Officially, they gave no explanation as to why they are shutting it down. With Sora no longer existing, the previously announced partnership with Disney is also terminated. Disney will not be making any investment into OpenAI. In this video, we will look at why OpenAI decided to shut down Sora and what this means for the company going forward.
In September of 2025, OpenAI launched its video generation model called Sora 2. In conjunction, they launched the Sora app. The Sora app is very similar to TikTok in that it allows users to endlessly scroll across short videos with a vertical aspect ratio, but all the content is AI generated. If you make a free account, you can generate up to 30 AI videos for free each day and publish them for other Sora users to view. When the app was first launched, it quickly became a viral trend with millions of people signing up for free accounts. The problem is OpenAI generates almost no revenue from Sora. There are no ads. If you use up your daily limit of 30 free generations, you can pay to get more, but very few people are willing to pay real money to generate AI slop, which is almost impossible to monetize. While Sora was an interesting gimmick that a lot of people wanted to try out, the videos quickly became repetitive and boring. The biggest category of videos on Sora are people trolling Sam Altman by generating videos of him doing questionable things. For example, the most liked video on Sora was this video of Sam Altman stealing a GPU from Target. You can screen record Sora videos and re-upload them to TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. AI-generated videos cannot be copyrighted. So there's really nothing that OpenAI can do about this. The vast majority of views on Sora-generated videos are on external platforms. To the extent that anybody is generating revenue from Sora videos, it's TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, not OpenAI.
Sam Altman has a blog on his website, samaltman.com. He used to publish blog posts somewhat regularly, but it seems he's taken a hiatus from posting. His last post was in October of 2025, where he gave an update on Sora. In the blog post, he said that OpenAI needs to start generating revenue from Sora somehow. It seems that their one and only plan to generate revenue is to allow users to pay real money for the permission to generate AI videos with fictional characters. OpenAI would give a share of this revenue to the copyright holders. This is what the partnership with Disney was supposed to be about. Yet, OpenAI shut down Sora before the Disney partnership was even implemented, meaning they probably generated almost no revenue from Sora during its entire existence.
So, why did this partnership fail to happen? Keep in mind that as part of the agreement, Disney would have to make a $1 billion equity investment into OpenAI. That's a lot of money to put at risk. To make this investment, Disney would need to be reasonably confident that they can make back at least a good portion of this investment with the Sora revenue share. While OpenAI does not disclose usage or revenue data for Sora, there are reasons to believe it has been a flop. The Sora app has been downloaded 9.6 million times across iOS and Android. But the vast majority of people download the app, mess around with it for a couple days, then get bored of it, and never use it again. Almost nobody is willing to pay real money for it. The analytics firm App Figures Intelligence has ways of estimating how much revenue iOS and Android apps generate. According to their estimates, Sora's revenue peaked at $540,000 in December and declined to $367,000 in January. Half a million dollars of monthly revenue is basically nothing and might as well be rounded down to zero. While we don't know the exact figures, Sora 2 almost certainly cost OpenAI billions of dollars to develop and operate for 6 months. Disney probably saw that story users are not willing to spend real money, so they would never make back their investment, and they probably wanted to avoid the embarrassment of getting involved with an app that is such an obvious flop. That's why they pulled out of the partnership. Sora was one of the dumbest and most wasteful ventures in business history. Billions of dollars burned with nothing to show for it. But perhaps we should not be too surprised. After all, Sam Altman himself has said that he is not business-minded and doesn't care how much money OpenAI burns.
So, what does this mean for OpenAI going forward? The information claims to have gained access to an internal memo written by Sam Altman that explains the decision to shut down Sora. Altman said that the Sora research team will prioritize longer-term world simulation research, especially as it pertains to robotics. There are growing signs that OpenAI is pivoting to robotics. On January 15th, 2026, OpenAI published a press release titled Strengthening the US AI Supply Chain through Domestic Manufacturing. In the press release, OpenAI claims that it is seeking suppliers for critical inputs for advanced robotics such as gearboxes, motors, and power electronics. Additionally, OpenAI is actively hiring robotics engineers. Gear is an active job posting for a research engineer for SLAM and multi-view geometry. SLAM is an acronym for simultaneous localization and mapping. This is a computer vision technique. This role involves working on real-time and offline SLAM pipelines used during teleoperation and robot data collection. It appears that OpenAI will seek to develop a humanoid robot similar to Tesla's Optimus robot. Sam Altman has long been interested in humanoid robots. In June of 2025, he talked about them in an interview he gave to Bloomberg. Let's have a listen.
>> The thing I think the world is not ready for, like people have maybe abstractly thought like, okay, it's going to be a better programmer than me. is going to be, you know, better at customer support and whatever. Um, I don't think the world has really had the humanoid robots >> moment yet. And I don't think that's very far away from like a visceral like, oh man, this is going to do a lot of things that people used to do. So, so yeah, it's coming. And we we have always tried to just be super honest about what we think the impact may be, realizing it will be wrong on a lot of details. >> What happens when the humanoid robots get here? Um, I mean they'll obviously do a lot of jobs, but what I the point I was trying to make is I think like the first day you're like walking down the street and there's like seven robots that walk past you doing things or whatever, it's going to feel very sci-fi. >> Mhm. >> According to Altman, within the near future, you will see seven humanoid robots walking down the street doing things or whatever, and it's going to feel very sci-fi.
OpenAI has something called the Startup Fund. It's a venture capital fund controlled by OpenAI that has $175 million to invest in startups. Keep in mind that OpenAI is losing money and itself receives venture capital funding to sustain its operations. They recycle some of their own venture capital money to make their own venture investments. The OpenAI Startup Fund has invested in two humanoid robot startups. In 2023, they led a funding round for a startup called 1X Home Robotics. In 2024, they participated in a funding round for the humanoid robot startup, Figure AI. Both of these startups are basically failures. OneX developed a robot called Neo, which is supposed to do chores in your house. In October of 2025, they gave a demonstration to the Wall Street Journal. The robot moved awkwardly and could barely perform any household chores. The Neo robot does not yet have autonomous capabilities. In the demonstration, it was remotely controlled by a teleoperator. At least 1X was honest and showcased its robot's embarrassing performance for what it was. The same cannot be said for Figure AI. Figure has a history of deceiving the public with staged and highly misleading demo videos. A few months ago, we published a video exposing Figure AI in great detail. If you haven't seen it already, we've linked it in the description below. It seems that Altman is no longer satisfied with just investing in humanoid robot startups. He now wants OpenAI to build its own humanoid robots.
OpenAI pivoting to robotics shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. When OpenAI was founded back in 2015, they had a vague mandate to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI. They were not initially focused on large language models. It wasn't until around 2019 that they shifted their focus to LLMs, which eventually culminated in ChatGPT. But before that, they experimented with multiple other types of AI. One of their earliest projects was to develop artificial intelligence that can power robots. In 2019, they made a robot hand which they claimed could solve a Rubik's cube. They ended their robotics research in 2020 so they could instead focus all their resources on developing ChatGPT. That was 6 years ago. Now it appears that LLMs are reaching the point of diminishing returns. GPT-5 was a huge disappointment, as it was only a marginal improvement over GPT-4. Altman now needs a new narrative to sell to investors as he gets ready to promote OpenAI's upcoming IPO. So, he's pivoting back to robotics. But there's a reason OpenAI abandoned its robotics research in the first place. Creating an autonomous humanoid robot that can perform useful tasks in the real world is not possible with current technology and will probably not be possible within our lifetimes. We've made multiple videos in the past explaining the massive technical challenges associated with humanoid robots. Take the example of Tesla. They announced their Optimus humanoid robot in 2021. Elon Musk has made grandiose statements about how the Optimus will displace all jobs and be worth trillions of dollars. But 5 years later, and all we have are staged demo videos where the Optimus is remotely controlled by human teleoperators. I expect to see something similar from OpenAI within the next year or so. They probably will make a prototype of a humanoid robot. Altman will make a bunch of grandiose claims and predictions about it. They will publish some staged PR demonstrations, but it will not be able to do anything useful.
All right, guys, that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about OpenAI's decision to shut down Sora and pivot to humanoid robots? Let us know in the comments section below. As always, thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next one. Wall Street Millennial signing.