Talk about a script change. OpenAI announced that it's "saying goodbye" to Sora, the AI video generation product that it launched to great fanfare in 2025.  

What makes the move even more stunning is that OpenAI and Walt Disney Co. had just struck a landmark three-year deal in December, with Disney pledging to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and handing OpenAI the exclusive right to incorporate hundreds of famous Disney characters into the AI product. It seemed as if OpenAI was set to become a major player in Hollywood, not to mention leapfrogging all the other AI video startups out there.  

So why is OpenAI calling it quits? OpenAI isn't saying much (it announced the shutdown in a four-sentence post with few details, shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported the plans Tuesday). 

It's probably not a coincidence that the move comes as OpenAI is trying to focus on its most important products amid fierce competition with Anthropic and Google. OpenAI recently merged several of its products into a single desktop 'superapp' and told employees to stop spending time on 'side quests.'

But if OpenAI saw main quest potential somewhere in Sora's future, it probably wouldn't be casting it aside so swiftly. 

Some observers on X and on Reddit speculated that the energy and computing costs of generating ultra-realistic video clips were probably too big of a money sink—especially if Sora's main users were dabblers unlikely to become paying OpenAI subscribers. And with an IPO rumored on the horizon, OpenAI needs its financials to sparkle.

It's also possible that OpenAI decided the legal and reputation risks involved in running a video generating app (deepfakes, IP infringement, etc) were too much trouble. Yes, the Disney deal was a huge win for OpenAI, but we haven't seen any other studios ink similar deals with OpenAI.

As for that Disney deal, which was struck by outgoing CEO Bob Iger: it's now dead in the water, according to various media reports.—AO

Reinventing your identity after forty years might sound like the telltale signs of a mid-life crisis. And in the case of 36-year-old chip design company Arm Holdings, a surprise announcement about its business model on Tuesday is raising eyebrows in the tech world. After decades of licensing its chip architecture to other companies (the processor inside your Apple iPhone, Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors, and the CPU portion of Nvidia's GPU products, to name just a few examples), Arm is doing something it has never done before: it will make and sell its own chip. 





The chip, dubbed the Arm AGI CPU,  will be specifically designed for AI workloads in data centers, and is being co-developed with Meta. That could put Arm in competition with many of the chipmakers who pay to license its chip designs, including Nvidia. It's a tricky line to walk, even if—as Arm told the New York Times—the new chip is more of a side-hustle targeted at a very limited number of cloud giants with specialized needs.





The history of tech is full of examples of companies who tried to license their technology to customers while also selling an in-house product that competed with those same customers. Customers usually don't appreciate it, and the experiments often proved short-lived (remember when Apple licensed its operating system to clone-makers in the 1990s?). Then again, we're in the age of AI, and many assumptions about wise business practices are being re-assessed (or ignored)—just think of all those "circular" deals AI companies are doing with each other.—AO

Apple is set to start selling ads in Apple Maps in the U.S. and Canada this summer. In a significant expansion of the company's advertising business, the company is launching a new initiative that gives businesses with a physical listing the ability to bid for placement next to relevant search results. Users will see a single ad per search, marked with a blue halo on the map pin and an "ad" label in the suggested places list. Apple has assured customers that user data won't be linked to Apple accounts, stored, or shared with third parties.

The Maps rollout is part of a broader restructuring Appl