Since its launch a few weeks ago, Sora has become the most downloaded app on the App Store. Last week, the Android app launched in select countries. Each user can generate 30 10-second videos for free per day or 15 videos per day if they are 15 seconds long.
This raises the question of how much it costs OpenAI to continue supporting Sora with the majority using it for free. According to a Forbes report, OpenAI is losing at least $15 million (~RM 62.24 million) a day or $5.4 billion (~RM 22.4 billion) just to generate videos that are mostly just empty AI entertainment.
The cost of generating a 10-second video is estimated to be around $1.3. This is because OpenAI does not share the number of Sora users but again it is estimated to be around 4.5 million. If only 25% of these users generated 10 videos per day, Sora would need to generate 11.3 million videos per day, costing $14.69 million.
This is a conservative estimate because it does not take into account the higher number of users and the amount generated per day. Although Sora is very popular among users, it is a financial burden for OpenAI. The same thing is faced by ChatGPT. Despite its popularity and dominance in the AI chatbot market, only about 19% of daily users subscribe, with the majority using it for free.
Although OpenAI has yet to show that it can be profitable, Sam Altman still dares to announce large-scale projects like Stargate, which cost $500 billion. This is a factor that Sam Altman himself admitted is the biggest bubble market since the dot.com at the beginning of the millennium. When it bursts, dozens of large companies will suffer huge losses.
