176 Days

Sora lasted 176 days.

I keep coming back to that number. Not because the product failed. Products fail all the time. What stays with me is what we spent and what we got.

Millions of people sat down at their computers and asked a machine to imagine something for them. Each request burned enough electricity to run a television for half an hour. The company running it was spending fifteen million dollars a day to keep the lights on. The whole operation brought in two million dollars total.

And the output. All those generated clips. The fake sunsets and imaginary cities and slow motion nothing. Where is any of it now? Did a single one of those videos change how someone sees the world? Did any of them make someone laugh in a way they still remember? I honestly don't know. Maybe. But I doubt it.

There is something almost beautiful about that kind of waste. Not beautiful like art. Beautiful like a bonfire. You watch it and you feel something and then it's just ash.

I think about this when I'm deciding what to build. The distance between what is possible and what is needed. They feel like they should overlap more than they do. A thing can be extraordinary and still be unwanted. That's not a tragedy. It's just the world telling you something, if you're willing to hear it.

Sora could make video out of words. That was real. The question was always whether anyone was waiting for that particular miracle.

Turns out almost nobody was.

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