SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has reacted to the shutdown of OpenAI’s video generation service, Sora. The billionaire also claimed that video generation tools will be essential for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical stage in AI development in which a model achieves human-level or better understanding across most tasks.
Musk was responding to a post by a user who questioned why the billionaire continued to invest in video generation tools, given that rivals like OpenAI had shut down the Sora service after reportedly losing $1 million per day.
The billionaire noted that xAI remains heavily involved in video generation through Grok Imagine, because he believes it is a path to achieving AGI. Musk hypothesised that visual data carries much more information than text or other inputs.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk said, “The future of AI is primarily video understanding and generation, because photons are by far the highest bandwidth form of communication. These are essential tools for AGI. Worth mentioning that Imagine is positive gross margin for @xAI, not a money loser.”
As per a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI’s Sora app was not only consuming a lot of resources, but it was also losing users constantly, with the user count of the service peaking at around a million soon after the launch of the app, but then going to less than 500,000 just a few months later.
Moreover, OpenAI has been losing ground to coding tools from Anthropic’s Claude, which lacks image or video generation features in its chatbot. The company has reportedly been looking for areas to deprioritise, and Sora became one such tool.
OpenAI has also reportedly been working on developing a ‘superapp’ that will use agentic AI tools to autonomously execute tasks for users, such as writing code, analysing data, and booking travel. The new tool could be created by merging the ChatGPT desktop app, Codex, and the Atlas browser.
Elon Musk’s bet on Grok Imagine:
In contrast, Musk has been doubling down on Grok Imagine despite the controversies that the tool has landed his company in. Just a few months back, users on X used Grok to generate sexualised deepfake images of women and children.
The controversy led to Musk’s chatbot being temporarily banned in Indonesia and Malaysia, while many governments around the world issued stern warnings to the company. While xAI did eventually make changes to prevent the generation of sexualised images, the chatbot is still often used by users to generate inappropriate content online.
Meanwhile, Musk has not stopped promoting the new Grok Imagine features that his company has announced in recent days.
Soon after the Sora app shutdown, Musk wrote on X, “The next @Grok Imagine release will be epic. We are doubling down.”
