2026-04-05 06:59:27
Apple crossed the five decade mark this past week. I saved so many retrospectives to read this weekend, but first I wanted to jot down some of my own thoughts. Since it was clearly finally okay for Apple itself to look back, I figured I would too.
I've previously written about how I was a full-blown PC kid growing up. People seem to find this funny since when I was a tech reporter, I in no small way made a name for myself covering Apple. My inbox and the comment sections of TechCrunch and VentureBeat from about 2005 to 2011 were constantly clogged by the term "fanboy". Which truly never bothered me. I was a fan!
Anyway, the backstory is a bit more nuanced. While the first computer our family owned was an IBM PS/2 Model 55 SX (eat your heart out with that branding, Microsoft), the first computer I actually used was at school. My elementary school in Ohio, like most schools back then, was filled with Apple machines. Specifically, the Apple IIe, the third iteration of the Apple II (after the original and the Apple II Plus). That was the first computer I actually used in my life.
Throughout school, the computer labs slowly sprinkled some Macs into the mix as well. And while I always appreciated the UI – the trash can in particular – I was a full-blown Windows aficionado at that point. The Mac just felt foreign to me.
By that point, we were well into the 1990s and Apple had started struggling. Seemingly piecemeal variants of the Mac started showing up in our computer labs. And some Mac clones – the horror – started showing up in the computer stores I would frequent. At the same time, Microsoft stepped on the gas. As a teenager, I lined up at midnight for the launch of two things: Pearl Jam albums and Windows 95.
Apple receded further into my computing background. One of my friends was a Mac loyalist – and we constantly made fun of him for it.1 The cool kids had Gateway 2000 PCs shipped in their big ass cow print boxes. Or, at the very least, you were getting a Dell, dude. Specs were king in the age of Pentium. Much like today, RAM reigned supreme. Apple seemed lost.
And then... the Mac crept back into the computer stores of the world. Rumor grew of a new operating system being worked on in the west. Whispers of a new UI. And Steve Jobs perceived. Apple's time had now come.
Still, I went off to college with a new Gateway tower PC and 44-pound, 19-inch monitor (yes, seriously). Paired with the rocket-fast ethernet connection in the dorm rooms, I was in computing heaven. This was also, I should point out, the heyday of Napster, LimeWire, and every other P2P file-sharing variant.
One day during freshman year I recall seeing some banners around campus to come check out the latest wares from Apple. Out of curiosity and boredom, I swung by a computer lab dotted with new iMacs, where some Apple reps were showing off early builds of OS X. It looked amazing – on the surface, not too dissimilar from how it looks today, 25+ years later – but also seemed fairly slow and buggy. I took a "Flower Power" iMac banner – yes, the banner, not the Mac – home with me.
While I didn't go to the midnight launch of Windows XP in 2001, I did buy it on day one. And Best Buy had a launch day deal where you got a free MP3 player with the purchase. It was the Intel Personal Audio Player 3000. Yes, my first MP3 player was not an iPod, but rather was made by Intel. Yes, Intel!
Amazingly, this was just two days after that original iPod was announced on stage by Steve Jobs.2 I remember thinking it was strange that Apple was making such a big bet on a music player.
It was not strange.
Like so many, that ended up being my entry point into the Apple ecosystem. The year was now 2004 and I had just graduated from college. I would be driving all the way across the country by myself. The nearly 2,400 mile, 10-state journey would take about 35 hours spread over a few days. I needed something to kill the time. Like, say, a thousand songs in my pocket.
Technically, by then, it was far more than 1,000, more like 10,000, as I bought the 40GB fourth-generation iPod for $399. And technically those songs weren't in my pocket, but attached to some crappy third-party FM transmitter which required a station change every few hundred miles due to radio interference. But my god was that device glorious. It stored every song I owned!3 It made my old Intel MP3 player – with 64MB of memory – seem like a piece of junk.
If those OS X demos laid the soil, the iPod planted the Apple seed.
I made it to California in no small part thanks to that iPod. And by the time I started working doing various jobs in Hollywood, it was all Apple, all the time. While the Dell laptop that made the journey with me was far faster, I was slowly learning about Apple software that simply wasn't available on a PC. It wasn't one thing, it was a million little touches that only became clear upon using these Apple products regularly: there was care put into the process. These devices were thoughtfully designed. A joy to use. They were everything a PC was not.
Before too long, I broke down, despite being basically broke, and bought an iBook.
No, not one of the fun candy-colored variety – I was a bit too late for those. Instead, I had a pristine, all-white iBook G4. It was tiny – 12.1" screen, just under 5 lbs – and beautiful. My Dell started to gather dust.
That was the last PC I ever owned. The iBook led to an iMac. And that led to a few dozen other Macs over the years, the most recent being the new MacBook Neo, on which I type this right now.
It seems wild to think now that the iPhone launched only a few years after I bought my first iPod. Perhaps because I was still so new to the Apple ecosystem, I also wasn't sold on the latest and greatest – despite Jobs' masterful presentation. Believe it or not, I was basically in the Steve Ballmer camp; $500? For a phone?!
Then I happened to find myself in an Apple Store on launch day in June 2007. I've never so quickly gone from thinking I would not buy something to buying it. Simply holding it for a few seconds was enough. This sounds hyperbolic or ridiculous. But it really was almost like an out-of-body experience. I just knew I was holding the future.
From time to time I'll pick up my iPhone – I've now bought one every single year since 2007, which seems like a problem, but I justify it with the notion that it's the most important device I own and use it far more than anything else, so always having the fastest version seems like a no-brainer – and I still feel this way. I still remember the hours spent every night on my PC waiting for things to load. And the hours spent trying to connect to the internet via dial-up modems. And the internet before there was even the world wide web. This context still makes the iPhone seem like magic. It's hard to imagine it will ever stop feeling that way.
From that Apple IIe in elementary school to now, that's roughly 40 years of Apple usage out of Apple's 50. But it has been heavily back-weighted, with really the past 20 years being all-Apple, all the time. I undoubtedly give Apple more grief these days, which I view as both warranted and an accurate reading of the broader room as they've grown into what has been the largest and arguably most powerful company in the world for much of the past decade. But I still absolutely love the products.
Yes, even the Vision Pro, which I believe Apple erred in releasing when they did. But I was actually using it last night for the first time in a few weeks, and they continue to refine it both software-wise and content-wise, to the point where it actually is getting more impressive with age. Granted, I still wouldn't recommend anyone spend $3,499 on it right now. But you no longer have to squint to see a world in which a far more svelte variety is in the future cards.
My only real concern now for the company is that Apple could get lapped if they don't fully control their own AI destiny. I think the Gemini partnership is a good (and necessary) step. But it probably needs to be a stopgap and bridge to buy them time to get to where they need to be internally. I believe they understand that, but I also believe no one yet fully knows how this will all play out. And it's probably the biggest risk for those next fifty years as the robots take over the world and whatnot.
For now, Apple remains positioned well. With the iPhone as the overall most-used device (that will continue to evolve into the central computing hub as new devices come), and the iPad as the main computer for many people, and with the Mac as the main machine for "real work" for an incredibly still growing number of people. Happy 50th, Apple.
1 Though that same friend did get a Power Mac G4 Cube at one point, which we all agreed looked amazing. That CD slot! But we also agreed it was the most beautiful paperweight ever created. ↩
2 And yes, this was all just a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. ↩
3 We'll use "owned" loosely here. See also: the aforementioned Napster days... ↩
2026-04-03 19:53:29
"The ability to influence the behaviour of others and obtain desired outcomes through attraction and co-option." I like the framing of the term "Soft Power" by The British Academy, for my purposes here.1 I think it serves as a succinct explanation for OpenAI's maneuver in acquiring TBPN.2
Yes, the company which just made a big to-do about killing off "side quests" and focusing – including, most notably, killing off their video product Sora – immediately followed that up by buying a video podcast. And yes, they announced it the day after April Fools. And no, it was not a joke. And yes, everyone made that joke.
I too had to dish out my initial snark upon hearing the news. Which was surprising to the point that it's the most I've been messaged by people with varying levels of "WTF?" in recent months. But actually, thinking more about it, and reading over some of the reports and statements, I think it makes some level of sense. I'm not sure it will work the way OpenAI hopes. But it's not the worst idea to try.
First and foremost, OpenAI's CEO of... something,3 Fidji Simo actually lays it out pretty plainly in her remarks on the matter:
As I've been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that's become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us. We're not a typical company. We're driving a really big technological shift. And with the mission of bringing AGI to the world comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates—with builders and people using the technology at the center.
That pretty much says it all right there. OpenAI clearly does not like the way the current narrative around AI is being framed. And they undoubtedly see the trend where it's shifting even more negative as time goes on, certainly in the US. I might argue, as I have, that a lot of this has to do with the actual messengers and messaging around the technology coming out of the AI labs and companies. But that's a hard thing to change. Steve Jobs, sadly, is not walking through that door. So instead, you take a page from the Don Draper playbook and "change the conversation".
Draper's method to do that would be through advertising. And well, OpenAI has been trying that. It doesn't seem to be working. Another way? Own a media company.
That’s exactly what TBPN has built. So rather than trying to recreate that ourselves, it made a lot of sense to bring them in, support what they’re doing, and help them scale—while keeping what makes them special. A core part of this is editorial independence. TBPN will continue to run their programming, choose their guests, and make their own editorial decisions. That’s foundational to their credibility, and it’s something we’re explicitly protecting as part of this agreement.
Again, Simo says it right there. Clearly, OpenAI was thinking about building up their own media entity in-house. But while a lot of companies have tried this to varying degrees of success in the era of "going direct", Simo clearly thought it made sense to buy versus build here.4
It's an expensive buy – "low hundreds of millions," reports George Hammond of The Financial Times – certainly when you're going to throw out the actual business (which seemed to be working quite well for them, which is why OpenAI had to pay such a premium). But it's all relative for a company that just raised um, $122B.
But the other important distinction here is that OpenAI is saying they're going to leave the TBPN guys alone to do their thing as they have been with the show. Famous last words and all that, but I do believe that's the intention here because again, to me this is about soft power. That is, this isn't about acquiring TBPN to turn it into a propaganda arm of OpenAI. That would be dumb because obviously that would backfire. Instead, Simo realized that TBPN already had alignment in their mandate to cover the tech world, and AI more specifically, more positively than many other outlets are doing at the moment.5 Spreading such gospel will help OpenAI's own interests quite naturally.
Now, there's a very real and fair question of what happens if that mandate changes. What if, say, AI starts to lead to some outcomes which are actually bad in very tangible ways for society (yes, some will say this is already happening, but I mean indisputable here for the sake of the argument)? Presumably, TBPN's independence would allow them to change their coverage and tone to meet the moment. Obviously, OpenAI – nor TBPN – thinks that will happen. And if it did, OpenAI would probably just cut the show loose.
But that sort of points to what's left unsaid here. That while TBPN may stay the same on paper, in practice, the way others interact with it will change. Is, say, Dario Amodei going to come on the show? Probably not! But that's a bit unfair since he wasn't a guest before the deal. A more interesting one is Mark Zuckerberg, who has been on the show. Will he be back? Probably not any time soon.
Other rivals will be in similar camps. Some may suck it up and go on to reach the audience. And if TBPN can indeed keep growing, fueled by OpenAI's resources, perhaps it will force the hand of Zuck and others to keep playing ball. That's undoubtedly the hope of both the TBPN team and OpenAI here. They have to know that pledge of independence or not, this deal changes those dynamics of the show. They just think they can overcome them. We'll see.
And that ties into the other potential issue here. While TBPN has built up an impressive audience in a relatively short amount of time, the reported 70k regular viewers per episode is obviously tiny compared to any number of other media outlets, let alone endless other shows on YouTube. If TBPN doesn't keep growing, the soft power playbook loses its effectiveness, fast.
Prior to this deal, the TBPN founders have been on the record noting that they didn't need to scale the show to reach a mainstream audience. That they were happy playing in their niche. Which made a lot of sense, it was a good niche that they were monetizing well, clearly! And not raising VC money gave them the optionality of staying in that niche. It was big enough.
This deal changes that equation. They no longer have to monetize, but for the soft power to work, they need to expand their reach. Otherwise they're just talking to the base over and over again. That works for Fox News, but that's a far different scale. And while there's clearly soft power at play there, it's also still a business.
This is just a soft power play. But for that to work, you need actual power. OpenAI is going to need to boost TBPN into something much larger than it is, otherwise, what's the point here? Again, TBPN was already doing what they're doing without the acquisition.
Maybe branching into adjacencies helps them escape the echo chamber effect – they mention events as one area of continued interest – but this is all very TBD for TPBN.
All that said, I still think this is an interesting tactic to try. As Simo notes, and as we're all well aware, OpenAI is not a normal company. The implication is that normal strategies won't work for them – or at least work as well. Clearly, the narrative has kept shifting away from them. Part of that is the macro view of AI (again, certainly in the US), but part of it is also their own self-owns. TBPN will try to help with the former, while founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan will work in-house in their apparent spare time to help with the latter. Will it work? We'll all get to watch in real-time!
I'll just end by quoting Don Draper earlier in the same conversation:
"Your concern over public opinion shows a guilty conscience. But what good is that serving you if what is to be done is already underway?"
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 The term, of course, was popularized by American political scientist Joseph Nye (who also happened to be a British Academy Fellow), in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Nye passed away just a year ago. ↩
2 Yes, while "TB" technically started as "Technology Brothers" – in an ironic sense – "Technology Business Podcast Network" has a decidedly more professional and ESPN ring to it... ↩
3 Technically now "CEO, AGI Deployment" but it's a title that keeps shifting like Ace Rothstein's in Casino. But it's not CEO of the entire company, at least not yet ;) ↩
4 A lesson from her Meta days? ↩
5 Which throws me back to my days, many moons ago, at TechCrunch, where we were constantly levied with such a charge, but instead made it a strength. It was... a very different time, of course. And I swear this is the last time I'll point out that what we were trying to do with OMG/JK wasn't entirely different than TBPN (just more Pardon the Interruption style). ↩
2026-04-01 04:32:42
When it comes to television, there is only really one show that truly matters: the NFL. Programs that win awards and have robust viewership are nice. But they're icing on the cake. The NFL is the cake. Everyone already knows this stat, but it's no less incredible: of the top 20 most-watched programs last year, either 18, 19, or all 20 were NFL games (there's some discrepancy in various ratings).
Which is to say that the NFL has an insanely strong hand when it comes to rights negotiations. Either you have an NFL package or you're simply not a player. It's undoubtedly part of the reason why Warner Bros Discovery had to sell. Yes, they were silly in fumbling their NBA rights, but it's the lack of NFL rights that kills them – or, specifically, keeps their networks shrinking. Their buyer, Paramount Skydance, of course, owns CBS. And CBS owns an NFL package. It's their most important asset. They can leverage it. And boy are they!
And actually, because of the earlier deal which saw Skydance take over Paramount, a change-of-ownership clause was triggered that allows the NFL to renegotiate that package even though the deal isn't up yet. And that, in turn, is going to lead to every other NFL rights holder renegotiating their rights. They technically don't have to, but what are they gonna do, tell the NFL no? Good luck on that next rights negotiation in a few years...
2026-03-30 17:54:26
Smart angle by my friend Steven Levy to not ask Apple about the past on the verge of their 50th anniversary – which Levy was right in the center of covering for nearly the entire run, of course – but about the future. And fitting that Apple dispatched John Ternus – he who would be king – rather than Tim Cook to talk (though Levy also managed to get a comment from Cook at an event, and Apple's longest serving executive, Greg Joswiak – 40 years! – was there too).
When Levy brought up the notion of Apple being behind in AI:
These gentlemen disagree. Apple, they insist, is already at the forefront of the AI revolution. “We were doing AI before we called it AI!” says Joswiak. “Every single great chatbot works great on our products.” Ternus argues that even if Apple didn't take the lead in developing AI technology, it would still benefit. “Our products are the best place people will use the existing AI tools.”
It's not quite as gaslight-y as the interview that Joswiak and Craig Federighi gave after last year's WWDC when asked about the clear downplaying of AI at the event (after touting it the year before and well, you know...), but I just wish they would frame this decidedly less defensively. Something like... "look, we view it as still the very early days of AI, and while we've been working on it for a while, and there have been some fits and starts, no one yet knows exactly how it's going to play out, so we're trying to take a pragmatic approach in our build out and ensure that our devices and platforms are the best place on which to build for that future."
Ternus is much closer in that regard, which is great to see, if he is indeed the next CEO of Apple. After Levy pushes back on their answers, wondering how they can ensure that Apple is the company making the devices of the future if they're not building the cutting edge of AI themselves:
“I would assume you want one of them to be an Apple device, right?” I asked.
The answer seemed to be not necessarily. “Let’s not lose sight of the fact that nothing you just said is incompatible with the iPhone,” Joswiak says. “The iPhone is not going to go away. iPhone is going to serve a very central role in any of those things you’re talking about.”
In the short term, no doubt. Even in the medium term, sure. But Levy reminds him of the framing he's asking about:
Wait—Apple thinks that people will be using the iPhone 50 years from now?
“It's hard to imagine not,” says Joswiak. “That's where everybody else struggles. They don't have an iPhone, and so they’re scrambling for what to do. A lot of what they talk about ends up being accessories for an iPhone. We’re not going to get into future road maps, but I will tell you, iPhones are not going anywhere.” (Despite this bravado, I will be shocked if Apple does not come out with some AI-powered gadget in the coming years.)
50 years from now will be 2076. While it some ways it does feel like technological breakthroughs are happening slower than 50 years ago on the consumer tech end, in other ways, things are moving far faster – including, of course, AI!
Beyond Apple's founding, 1976 was about color TVs, early video games, and microwaves. Big, chunky tech starting in the home that would be refined and miniaturized as things moved digital. It's probably reasonable to think we'll have something akin to an iPhone 50 years from now, but the form factor will be far different. Perhaps something you wear, or a tiny piece of tech that still lives in your pocket, but unfolds into (or syncs with) something more robust depending on the use case. Will that still be an 'iPhone'? That's harder to see. It would be wild if the same branding exists by then – the concept of a "phone" is already a bit silly. But again, some sort of main computing hub still may be around...
That could, of course, be our robots back in our homes running computing workflows agenticly for us and pinging us as needed...
Later in the day I have my greeting with Cook, and immediately ask him about Apple’s next 50 years. He launches into a rhapsodic description of Apple’s people, values, and culture, predicting that no matter what twists lie ahead, those factors will continue to make Apple unique and super successful. “Yes, the technologies of the future will change,” Cook says. “Yes, there will be more products and more categories. All of those things are true, but the things that made Apple. Apple will be the same for the next 50 years, and the next 100 and the next 1,000.”
It's a nice sentiment, but a bit silly. While companies like Nokia, Siemens, and GE are all over 100 years old, they all started life quite differently, of course – Nokia famously as a paper mill! More "pure" tech still around today is probably IBM, which is 125 years old. Given that tech is now central to pretty much everything in modern life, it's certainly reasonable to think some of the current companies will be around in 100 years – 2126 – but undoubtedly most will not. That's just the reality of business. Things go boom and bust – or they get merged out of existence.
A thousand years? 3026. I would make a joke about hoping the world exists by then, but that's too morbid and depressing. So instead I'll make a joke about hoping that Apple has fixed Siri by then to run well on the iPhone 1018 Pro.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
2026-03-27 07:27:59
It's not about the money, it's about the message. With the news that Meta and YouTube were being held liable in a case about the harms of their addictive features just two days after Meta was found liable in a separate case around child safeguards, the writing isn't so much as on the wall as it's on the docket. Big Tech is facing a reckoning.
I would say it's about "social media", but well, YouTube isn't really social media.1 And actually I think you can tie this into other tangential topics around the broader tech industry at the moment. Most prominently, the simmering backlash against AI as well. Meta may be the poster child, but again, it feels like the entire Big Tech family is going to get wrapped up in this.
Regardless of the merits of the individual cases, the real read of the (court)room is the macro one. This isn't a moment, it's a movement. And it's spreading. In part because lawmakers have failed to act, and the companies themselves have failed to adequately self-police, now the people are taking matters into their own hands. Those citizens seem sick of everyone glued to their devices at all times. Yes, children especially, but I suspect this distaste runs far deeper. Including within Silicon Valley itself! Add this animosity to the growing anxiety around AI from these very same companies coming to potentially upend livelihoods and... kaboom.
Nearly every story about this latest verdict draws the comparison to the "Big Tobacco" cases from 30 years ago. It doesn't matter what the parallels are, all that matters is that every story is drawing them. This is an absolute optics disaster for Big Tech. And it feels like it's just getting started.
Again, Meta is low-hanging fruit. YouTube perhaps thought they could get away here because again, they're not actually social media. But they cannot. And while TikTok and Snap opted to settle rather than risk this verdict, they're not going to get away from every case. You have to wonder if and when Apple gets roped in as well since they largely control the devices which enables these services. Google will get hit here as well. Perhaps even Microsoft if the contagion spreads to PCs.
When the AI backlash starts in full, certainly OpenAI and Anthropic will be right in the crosshairs. And maybe NVIDIA gets pulled in as well for enabling all of this. Probably even SpaceX, now that they own Xitter and xAI, which are already in the midst of their own various shitshows due to deep fakes and other sketchy content. And once Tesla and SpaceX inevitably merge, we'll have basically all the largest companies in the world wrapped up in these cases. Maybe there's a way to bring Amazon in too thanks to AWS. Or maybe it's Alexa, which seems to want to get more racy at the moment too. Have I mentioned that Oracle is a primary owner of TikTok now?2
Yes, this remains very strange.
In many ways, none of this is surprising. Again, merits of the cases aside, these are the largest companies in the world. I mean that both in terms of market cap and reach, but also in terms of numbers of people they employ. Yet every day now seems to bring a headline about mass layoffs while at the same time posting record profits. It has long been a very weird "best of times/worst of times" dichotomy and AI is accelerating it. People must look at the layoffs constantly happening at Meta and wonder what shot they possibly have to make it in this new world.
And as I've written about before with AI in particular, all of these companies seemingly have some very real messenger issues. That is, the public by and large doesn't seem to like the people peddling the future here. And that's undoubtedly in part because they don't trust them from the immediate past when they were peddling social media and then VR and then crypto and then every other thing seemingly purpose-build, at least narratively, to freak people out or piss them off.
And so here we are, at the dawn of yet another "techlash".3 But this one could be far larger because the fallout from yesterday is running right into the fears for tomorrow.
I'm not saying this is right or wrong, I'm just saying it's happening. And it's happening in no small part because Big Tech is awful with their positioning and posture. Does Facebook cause cancer? No, but you'd never know it based on the backlash. Before long, it will be framed as being worse than cancer.
Big Tech will be fined the equivalent of coins in their couch cushions over and over again and they'll shrug it off over and over again. Has Europe taught us nothing? No, because Europe has learned nothing. Honestly, their endless fines have probably helped teach Silicon Valley the wrong lessons, and to look past the real issues. After all, these are admired companies – in no small part because they're so successful! Which will be true until it is suddenly not. And what I think you can see here is the trend bubbling up that people increasingly don't want to like these companies. They're too big and too powerful. They're like the government. But one you can sue over and over again.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Increasingly, it's just media. Yes, there are algorithms at play, but the same is true at any modern media company now. Which is why it was silly not to frame YouTube as a Netflix competitor in the would-have-been Warner Bros deal. Going forward, YouTube is the main Netflix competitor. Not some other "streaming services" which Netflix long ago left in the dust. ↩
2 And at the rate that Snap's stock keeps falling – now just a $6B company – someone is going to end up owning them too. ↩
3 Strange how Meta/Facebook always seems to be right at the center of these... ↩
2026-03-26 03:55:18
Well, I'd like to say it was fun while it lasted. But the reality is that it barely lasted. I speak, of course, of Sora. And specifically the productized version of OpenAI's video models which launched to much fanfare just a few months ago and quickly rocketed to the top of the App Store. OpenAI brought the axe down so quickly that it apparently surprised both their key partner Disney and even the team internally working on Sora. Even by OpenAI standards, this seems pretty wild.
Of course this also wasn't totally out of left field. A couple weeks ago, a report suggested that Sora was over as a stand-alone app and service. And that seemingly made sense. After the aforementioned initial surge, Sora slowly slid down the download charts and usage seemed to be dwindling over time. As it turns out, much like the Studio Ghibli situation before it, it was a mere viral moment in time. OpenAI is great at creating these, but they're fleeting. That's a problem when you've built a whole service around one.
Sora was the most fun I recalled having with a new app in a while, but I also noted that the key probably wasn't the TikTok-style network, but instead how it eased the creation process for video. I thought individual sharing of such videos was more interesting than pushing them out publicly because clearly most of the novelty was around the insertion of people you knew in the videos. Celebrities inevitably tried to tap into this, but it all felt a bit insincere at best, and cash-grabby at worst.
So yes, it made sense to shift the focus from the app to bring such tools into ChatGPT itself. In particular as the service tried to do more social/collaborative things there – bringing more chat into ChatGPT, as it were.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the roll-up: OpenAI clearly started to freak the fuck out about the traction Anthropic was suddenly seeing.
That mixed with the building push to go public is undoubtedly a big part of what shifted a move to bundle Sora to a move to murder Sora. This is all related. Anthropic is also said to be making moves to go public. And because of their position in the market – in the enterprise market in particular – and their path to profits looking much clearer, this was always going to be a problem for OpenAI. But the moment Claude Code – and tangentially, Claude Cowork – is having probably pushed it all over the edge.
Last week came news that "side quests" would no longer be a part of OpenAI's path. And was there any bigger side quest than Sora? Again, you'd think they could just kill the app and stand-alone service, bringing it into ChatGPT itself – as seemed to be the plan – but the reality there remained just how expensive it was to actually create such videos. OpenAI probably ran then re-ran the numbers. There was just no way to justify it with a straight face if they were truly hoping to paint a path to profitability picture to Wall Street any time soon.
Fine. No fun, but we get it. OpenAI has bigger GPUs to fry.
But what's really wild is shafting Disney in the process. I mean, they're without question the most important entertainment and content company in the world. And OpenAI seemingly did them dirty. The fact that Disney is no longer looking to do the major investment which sure seemed like a good idea to them – checks notes – just three months ago, seems to say a lot.1 You have to imagine OpenAI would still welcome such an investment. They need any and all money! Even without Sora, you have to imagine there was a path to future partnerships here. But no. Not the way OpenAI executed this. Ouch.
And my god how incredibly awkward for Josh D'Amaro, just one week into his new role as CEO of Disney. While Bob Iger put his name on this deal and subsequent PR around it, all indications were that D'Amaro was the one who really pushed for it. And it played up to technology prowess being a key point of his ascension and plan. This plus the news that Fortnite maker (and key Disney partner/investment) Epic is doing massive layoffs this week.. Again, ouch.
Anyway, back to Sora. This sucks. Not because Sora was particularly useful – though I maintain it was good fun, even now opening it, I get sucked into a rabbit hole that I fill with laughter. I wasn't getting sucked in nearly enough for it to make sense stand-alone, but certainly the technology was compelling! Which is why Google, Meta, and others have been working on video models as well, obviously. It looked like OpenAI had played them with the Disney deal, until they realized that they played themselves.
Was it an IP minefield? No doubt. Did it raise some very real ethical questions about raising the dead to have them do dumb shit in viral videos? For sure. But it was also pretty fun. And very funny. And wonderfully simple to use.
All this sucks because it points to a world in which OpenAI is definitely less product-focused going forward and much more about drilling down on the business. That's undoubtedly the right move for the company given everything going on, but that doesn't make it the right move for me, the end user.
Goodnight, not-so-sweet viral prince. We hardly knew ye. I'm so Sora for our loss.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Also, why do weird things keep happening around promised OpenAI investments?... ↩
