The chief executive of OpenAI recently shared a surprising personal story about his struggles with social media. Sam Altman revealed that he had to delete TikTok from his phone after finding himself unable to stop scrolling through the endless video feed. He originally downloaded the app to study its addictive nature while his company was building a competing platform called Sora.
Altman admitted that his screen time quickly spiraled out of control, eventually leading him to remove the application completely.
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The company shut down its video project to save computing power
While Altman was busy trying to break his scrolling habit, his team faced a similar problem with its own software. The company was developing a social media application powered by artificial intelligence that aimed to rival major video platforms. However, it decided to pull the plug on the consumer app version of Sora in March.
The choice to abandon the project came down to basic resources. Generating millions of videos requires a massive amount of computing power. As rival tech firms continued to push the boundaries of AI development, the company realized it could not justify the high server costs required to keep a free video feed running.
In the end, both the executive and the company reached the same conclusion from different angles. Altman realized that endless video scrolling consumed too much of his personal time, while his engineering team determined that generating those same videos consumed far too much computing power to be a sustainable product.
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