🟢 Sora is Dead. Designers' jobs are not going anywhere anytime soon.
On March 24, 2026, OpenAI quietly announced it was shutting down Sora, its text-to-video app launched just six months earlier with fanfare and many revolutionary claims. Well, just like the metaverse or NFTs, it's been a short-lived success, a lot of buzz, and eventually no unit economics.
Maxwell Zeff
Downloads had collapsed by 66% since November; the in-app revenue was about $2.1 million, while the inference cost was an estimated $15 million. Not to mention that the splashy $1 billion Disney investment, scheduled to license 200+ characters, including Mickey Mouse, dissolved overnight without a single dollar changing hands.
Here are five things this tells us about where we actually are on the AI hype rollercoster.
1. The Metaverse all over again
Since the first internet bubble, the US tech industry has been running the same tired script: they announce the end of the world, promise a new land, demo impressively a few things that don't make any money, raise aggressively, and start flooding the zone with a few products, more partnerships, and much (much) more press releases. In the following pile of bets and debts, all these new tech companies hope to survive long enough to become real.
In no specific order, we saw this with the metaverse, crypto and NFTs, self-driving, hyperloop, humanoid robots, and I probably forgot a dozen more. It's all about capturing as much capital as possible and running with the money. If you survive the hype cycle, maybe (maybe) you deliver something that justifies the valuation.
