Killed by a budget meeting

Sayonara, Sora. Not because anyone stopped using it. Not because it stopped working. Because someone in a room looked at the GPU bill and decided the compute was needed elsewhere, and that was that. The WSJ broke it this morning. I have been thinking about it ever since.

The image thing is in the Q2 backlog. It has been in the Q2 backlog since week four. It has its own ticket. Priya opened the ticket. The ticket says "more of an experience than a feature" because that's the description we were given and nobody has replaced it with anything more buildable.

I'm not worried about the image thing being killed by a GPU budget meeting. I'm aware of the irony of being worried about the opposite problem.

Marcus messaged at 9:17 this morning. "did u see sora got cancelled." I confirmed that I had. He replied: "feels like a warning tbh." I spent some time working out what that meant. I reckon he was suggesting that features can die. I think this was intended as urgency. I think he's reached the conclusion, independently and about forty days late, that the image thing should probably be built at some point.

There is now a Teams message from our CTO that says "let's find some time this week" about the image thing. He has been on LinkedIn. I cannot prove this but I know it the way you know when it's about to rain.

The thing about Sora is that it wasn't a bad product. By most accounts it was impressive. It just cost an enormous amount to run and not enough people were using it to justify what it was taking from everything else. OpenAI looked at the tradeoffs and made a call. Cold, merciless, unremittingly brutal. In the trade, we would call this prioritisation.

Here, we call it the Q2 backlog.

The image thing will survive the week. Marcus's urgency will not. By Thursday he will have found something else on LinkedIn. The CTO's calendar is already full — I've checked. "Let's find some time" historically means let's find some time in Q3.

Sora got killed by a GPU budget meeting. The image thing will survive indefinitely because nobody important enough to kill it has looked at it long enough to make a decision.

There are worse fates. I reckon.