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 where the model achieves human-level or better understanding in most tasks.
Musk was responding to a post by a user who questioned what was the reason for the billionaire to continue to be invested in video generation tools when rivals like OpenAI shut down the Sora service because it was reportedly losing $1 million per day on it.
The billionaire noted that xAI continues to be heavily involved in video generation via Grok Imagine because he believes it is a way to achieve AGI. Musk set his hypothesis on the idea that visual data carries a lot 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 also been losing ground to coding tools from Anthropic’s Claude, which has no image or video generation features within 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’ which will make use of agentic AI tools to autonomously execute tasks for users like 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 getting temporarily banned in Indonesia and Malaysia, while many global governments gave a stern warning 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
