The T-shaped leader, Disney can’t catch a break, and will you trust Auto mode?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:05)
Andrew, what do you think, is this the time that they finally start clamping down all these underpriced AI services? Like, is it all going to start getting expensive now? Is that where we're at?

**Andrew Zichler** (0:13)
Clamping down? Yeah, you know, I've talked on the show before about how sometimes it feels like the token cost world that we live in right now feels very temporary, almost fictional. I guess they'll come on the show and give me varied opinions on why they think I'm wrong or why they think I'm right, why token costs will go up and go down. You know, you're not the only one as well, but one thing remains for certain, like with the tokens available to me right now, I try to use them and learn from them because I just feel like eventually the belt is going to tighten. And maybe some people are starting to feel that heat now because I definitely think our industry, you know, in the middle as we approach the middle of the year, it's really evaluating their spending.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (0:55)
Yeah, use those usage session windows while you got them. Use all of them if you can.

**Andrew Zichler** (1:02)
So what does that mean for people that are users of AI, you think?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:06)
Oh man, it's too early for me to really know the answer to that. Yeah, I mean, I think people will pay for it. If they're getting value out of it, they're going to pay for it. So it doesn't matter if it costs $200, $2,000. If you get more value out of it, then it's worth it, you know.

**Andrew Zichler** (1:22)
Indeed.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:23)
Well, anyways, welcome to your Friday Deploy. I'm your host, Ben Lloyd-Pearson.

**Andrew Zichler** (1:28)
And I'm your host, Andrew Zichler.

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (1:30)
And this week, we're covering the death of Sora, Claude Code's new safety controls, the end of computer programming as we know it, and Microsoft's attempt at a redemption tour. Andrew, we got to start off with the sad, sad news of Sora being shut down. So what's going on here?

**Andrew Zichler** (1:49)
Yeah, speaking of belt tightening, OpenAI is shutting down its standalone Sora video app. And this is the focus on enterprise customers. Which they claim, as the company prepares for their potential IPO. That's despite Sora reaching over one million downloads within days of its September launch. We all know how fast ChatGPT grew, Sora grew even faster. So the decision to kill a proposed three-year deal with Disney is something that accompanies this decision, because Disney was looking to invest $1 billion into OpenAI.
In exchange, OpenAI would have access to Disney's IP for a limited time. You know, this represents a pretty strategic pivot, I think, from consumer-facing products towards going back towards the enterprise and the business market. Maybe OpenAI, like Anthropic, sees more sustainable revenue in enterprise sales and rather than making direct-to-consumer solutions. What do you think, Ben?

**Ben Lloyd-Pearson** (2:49)
I mean, it sounds to me like you're saying that selling trinkets at a loss doesn't get fixed when you do it at scale. Is that, you know, is that what we're describing here? Yeah, it's hard for me to know if this is like a cost thing, like it just cost them too much to run Sora, or if it's more like they had this partnership with a company like Disney, maybe Disney wasn't impressed by the technology and decided that the partnership wasn't going to work. And by backing out of it, it kind of like de-legitimized the product itself, like just the foundational market fit of it. But, you know, I think really what we should take away from this is that, you know, AI is really like this lumpy bubble that's forming. Like we talk about lumpy adoption with AI a lot, like there are teams that are doing really well with it, are accelerating super quickly, and there's other teams that aren't, and teams everywhere in the middle. I actually think that something very similar is happening with the bubble that's being created around AI. It really does, in many circumstances, deliver a lot of value, so it helps you write code faster, helps you do complex analysis and research. But with video, a tool like Sora just doesn't really provide those same sorts of gains. You don't get a productivity gain or a quality gain. It's just like a cool tech with some gimmicky consumer applications, I feel like.
And they're just really kind of dealing with like, I don't know, it feels like a physics problem at some point. Like, there's a complexity issue with this. Like, chat is just like a single string of tokens, so it's like relatively affordable to like generate large amounts of text with an AI model. But if you think of like an image, it's almost like a matrix of tokens, right? It becomes like a two-dimensional array. And then if you have a video, it's like a series of a bunch, like potentially millions of those matrices in a row. So you're actually stepping up in an order of magnitude to go from text to image and then to video. And I personally just think it's like it's too expensive for consumers to use AI video generators in a useful way. Like they're a gimmick that's fun to play with, but to actually like produce something with them, it's just like the costs are just too high at this point. And I just really think it's a great example of how like, it might be cool technology, but it doesn't seem to meet societal's needs right now. Like I feel like if you're looking for one place where society is going to resist AI adoption in particular, I think videos really are both from like a, just the creepiness factor of like having AI generated videos, but also the tech just isn't there for the ways that people would want to actually use it.