Tuesday, March 31
Tuesday, March 31
Disney Found Out Sora Was Dead Less Than an Hour Before Everyone Else
OpenAI killed Sora, its AI video tool, after just six months. A WSJ investigation surfaced Sunday via TechCrunch paints a grim picture: ~$1M/day in compute costs, fewer than 500,000 users, and a lifetime revenue of $2.1 million. That's roughly what it cost to run for two days. But the real gut punch landed on Disney, which had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership and learned it was over with less than an hour's warning. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been quietly gutting experimental APIs, fine-tuning tools, and ChatGPT-era plugins in the same sweep.
Disney Found Out Sora Was Dead Less Than an Hour Before Everyone Else
OpenAI killed Sora, its AI video tool, after just six months. A WSJ investigation surfaced Sunday via TechCrunch paints a grim picture: ~$1M/day in compute costs, fewer than 500,000 users, and a lifetime revenue of $2.1 million. That's roughly what it cost to run for two days. But the real gut punch landed on Disney, which had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership and learned it was over with less than an hour's warning. Meanwhile, OpenAI has been quietly gutting experimental APIs, fine-tuning tools, and ChatGPT-era plugins in the same sweep.
AI Moves, Models, and Monday's Big Debates
Monday morning and the AI industry is in full spring-cleaning mode. Some of the things getting swept out are barely six months old.
- OpenAI shut down Sora over the weekend. A WSJ investigation revealed it was burning roughly $1M per day with a shrinking user base. Disney had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership and reportedly found out about the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement.
- The Sora team pivots to robotics and world simulation research. The app goes dark April 26; the API shuts down September 24.
- OpenAI also quietly shelved "Adult Mode" for ChatGPT and curtailed several experimental API endpoints in the same sweep.
Consolidation season. But plenty of new things sprouting too.
Monday morning and the AI industry is in full spring-cleaning mode. Some of the things getting swept out are barely six months old.
- OpenAI shut down Sora over the weekend. A WSJ investigation revealed it was burning roughly $1M per day with a shrinking user base. Disney had committed $1 billion to a Sora partnership and reportedly found out about the shutdown less than an hour before the public announcement.
- The Sora team pivots to robotics and world simulation research. The app goes dark April 26; the API shuts down September 24.
- OpenAI also quietly shelved "Adult Mode" for ChatGPT and curtailed several experimental API endpoints in the same sweep.
Consolidation season. But plenty of new things sprouting too.
Platforms, Tools, and a Few Wild Cards
Apple celebrates its 50th tomorrow with AI as the elephant in the room. The company hired former Google VP Lilian Rincon to lead AI product marketing. Mac Pro has been quietly removed from the website with no replacement coming. WWDC is set for June with AI as the headline focus. iOS 26.4 shipped with CarPlay AI chatbot support and new emoji.
New Agent Plugin lets you build and deploy serverless apps through AI coding assistants like Kiro, Claude Code, and Cursor. SageMaker Studio now supports Kiro and Cursor as remote IDEs. Lambda gets a 4x bump on file descriptors and 32GB memory support. Also: a new AI & ML Scholars program for up to 100,000 learners.
The hottest dev post today: a practical guide to building your own router from any Linux-capable device, prompted by U.S. import restrictions on consumer router models. Debian, a mini-PC, a couple USB ports. "There's nothing special about routers — they're all just computers after all." Hardware sovereignty is clearly a live nerve.
An independent teardown of 13 U.S. government apps turned up some findings. The White House app ships with Huawei tracking code. CBP's passport app retains faceprints up to 75 years. ICE's SmartLINK collects geolocation, voice prints, and medical data under "unlimited rights." Based on static APK analysis, not yet independently verified.
ShinyHunters compromised part of the European Commission's AWS-hosted cloud infrastructure, walking out with 350GB+ of employee emails, databases, contracts, and internal documents. Officials say the damage was contained to a single AWS account. Cold comfort given what was in it.
Tired of dragging blocks around in Apple's Shortcuts editor? Cherri lets you write Shortcuts in an actual programming language. Niche tool, genuinely delighted community. If you've ever tried to build anything complex in Shortcuts and wanted to throw your phone, this one's for you.
Starcloud raised $170M to put AI compute in orbit. The pitch: an 88,000-satellite constellation running on near-continuous solar power, solving the energy problem by leaving the planet entirely. They've already tested Nvidia hardware in space. Data center economics may literally be going extraterrestrial.
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