The AI industry is an unsustainable economic bubble.
Host Adam Conover asserts that Sora is a morally and financially indefensible product. He highlights its immediate societal harms, which include:
- Enabling deepfakes, bullying, and the generation of racist content.
- The unauthorized use of real and deceased public figures’ likenesses (like Martin Luther King Jr.).
- Creating a massive potential for realistic fake news and political propaganda, thereby making the internet a less reliable source of information.
Economically, the app is considered a failure, costing OpenAI an estimated over $5 to generate every single video while having no clear plan for monetization. Conover contends that this lack of profitability, alongside the failure of recent models like GPT-5 to deliver on hype, shows the models are hitting a ceiling, failing to progress toward “super intelligence.”
The video claims the broader economy is being propped up by monumental, unsustainable investments in AI infrastructure. These companies need to generate an impossible $2 trillion in annual revenue by 2030—more than the combined revenue of the six largest tech companies—which they are currently failing to meet. Sora, therefore, serves only to generate hype and attention for Sam Altman, prolonging a bubble whose eventual collapse will primarily hurt the retirement funds of ordinary Americans, not the tech investors who profit from the speculation.