It’s expected to generate decent revenue and is very cheap for OpenAI to do, because it doesn’t take up the time/intellectual energy of the people actually doing AGI research (they just hire more people to work on the slop-generators), so why not.
They’re worried they may not have enough money/long-term investors for all their plans, and this kind of thing attracts investors, so they have to spend some resources doing it.
They’re hedging their bets, because even though they expect AGI within the current Presidency, maybe it’d go slower than expected, and they’d need to survive in the meantime.
Sam Altman made all those jokes about creating a social-media platform to outcompete X/Facebook in response to some provocations from them; maybe he got that idea into his head and is now forcing others to do it and/or others think this is what he wants so they sycophancy’d themselves into working on it.
This is part of some galaxy-brained legal-warfare strategy. For example, they’re currently doing this thing, saying they’ll produce copyrighted content unless copyright-holders manually opt out. Perhaps they’re baiting a legal battle over this to see if they could win it, but since it’ll be over video content, if they lose, it won’t impact their main text-generating models; and if they win, they’ll repeat it for text as well.
They want to have billions of people reliably consuming their video content daily as part of their master plan to take over the world which involves deploying memetic hazards at industrial scales.
Probably one of the first three.
Hm, actually, this means estimating what % of OpenAI’s resources this takes is a way to estimate how confident they are in their AGI roadmap. (Though harder to distinguish between “we may not have enough money” and “we’re not confident in our research agenda”.)
Random low-effort off-the-top-of-my-head ideas:
It’s expected to generate decent revenue and is very cheap for OpenAI to do, because it doesn’t take up the time/intellectual energy of the people actually doing AGI research (they just hire more people to work on the slop-generators), so why not.
They’re worried they may not have enough money/long-term investors for all their plans, and this kind of thing attracts investors, so they have to spend some resources doing it.
They’re hedging their bets, because even though they expect AGI within the current Presidency, maybe it’d go slower than expected, and they’d need to survive in the meantime.
Sam Altman made all those jokes about creating a social-media platform to outcompete X/Facebook in response to some provocations from them; maybe he got that idea into his head and is now forcing others to do it and/or others think this is what he wants so they sycophancy’d themselves into working on it.
This is part of some galaxy-brained legal-warfare strategy. For example, they’re currently doing this thing, saying they’ll produce copyrighted content unless copyright-holders manually opt out. Perhaps they’re baiting a legal battle over this to see if they could win it, but since it’ll be over video content, if they lose, it won’t impact their main text-generating models; and if they win, they’ll repeat it for text as well.
They want to have billions of people reliably consuming their video content daily as part of their master plan to take over the world which involves deploying memetic hazards at industrial scales.
Probably one of the first three.
Hm, actually, this means estimating what % of OpenAI’s resources this takes is a way to estimate how confident they are in their AGI roadmap. (Though harder to distinguish between “we may not have enough money” and “we’re not confident in our research agenda”.)
I would bet on the second one being the primary motivator. They lost $13.5 billion in H1 2025 and are seeking $30 billion in the next round of funding.
The platform is big and flashy, so even if it’s ultimately a bust it might look good for that round. If it does well then even better.
Interesting wrinkle is they are making themselves a competitor of infrastructure partner Oracle, given its upcoming purchase of TikTok.
That’s what Altman seems to be claiming, yes.