By Ahmed Elgammal
Publication Date: 2026-04-27 12:15:00
OpenAI officially discontinued its video generation tool Sora on April 26, 2026.
I’m a computer scientist who has been building AI tools and studying their development and adoption for the last decade, and OpenAI’s decision to close Sora didn’t surprise me.
To me, the challenges Sora faced reflect deeper limitations to the AI’s creative abilities that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
problems from the start
OpenAI introduced Sora on February 15, 2024 as an AI tool that gives users the ability to create short videos from text prompts. To achieve this, the technology essentially predicted how images would change from frame to frame based on what it “learned” from millions of hours of existing footage.
But there were problems with it from the start.
First, Sora was expensive to run. Generating videos requires far more computing power than creating text or images, making it difficult for OpenAI to keep costs under control. It didn’t bring in enough money either…
