RIP Sora 🪦

OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora

OpenAI announced it's pulling the plug on Sora, the TikTok-style social app built around its AI video generator. OpenAI didn't give a reason for the shutdown or say when it will officially go dark.

What happened: Sora let users generate AI videos and share them in a vertical feed. Its flagship feature allowed people to scan their faces and create realistic deepfakes of themselves—which other users could then remix.

• The result was predictable: an under-moderated flood of creepy content, including unauthorized videos of public figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robin Williams, prompting their families to publicly ask users to stop.

• Copyrighted characters ran rampant too—Mario smoking weed, Pikachu doing ASMR.

• Plus, Disney reportedly backed out of its deal with OpenAI. Disney had agreed to invest $1 billion in the tech company and license some of its iconic characters for use in Sora.

The numbers: Sora peaked in November with about 3.3 million downloads, but by February that had dropped to 1.1 million. In its lifetime, the app made roughly $2.1 million from in-app purchases—a rounding error for a company spending billions on compute. The underlying Sora 2 model is still available behind the ChatGPT paywall.

Musk Announces Plans for a Terafab Chip Plant in Austin

Elon Musk announced plans to build a "Terafab" chip fabrication plant in Austin, Texas, jointly run by Tesla and SpaceX. The goal: produce chips at scale for robotics, AI, and space-based data centers across Musk's empire.

What he's promising: 

• Musk said the facility would eventually produce chips capable of supporting up to 200 gigawatts of computing power on Earth and up to a terawatt in space. 

• "We either build the Terafab or we don't have the chips," Musk said. "And we need the chips, so we build the Terafab."

The skepticism: Building a chip fab is extraordinarily complex—requiring billions of dollars, years of construction, and highly specialized equipment. And as Bloomberg noted, Musk "has no background in semiconductor production and a history of over-promising on goals and timelines." He offered no timeline for when the facility might come online or hit those targets.

Cursor’s New Coding Model Is Built on A Chinese AI Model

AI coding company Cursor launched a new model this week called Composer 2, promoting it as offering "frontier-level coding intelligence." But users quickly discovered something the company didn't mention: It's built on top of Kimi 2.5, an open-source model from Chinese company Moonshot AI.

What happened: An X user noticed code identifying Kimi as the underlying model and called Cursor out for not renaming the model ID. Cursor VP Lee Robinson acknowledged the base, saying only about a quarter of the compute came from Kimi and the rest came from Cursor's own training. Moonshot confirmed the use was authorized through a commercial partnership.

Why it matters: Cursor is a well-funded US startup—$2.3 billion raised at a $29 billion valuation, reportedly exceeding $2 billion in annualized revenue. Building on a Chinese model might feel fraught given the framing of AI as an existential US-China competition. Co-founder Aman Sanger admitted, "It was a miss to not mention the Kimi base in our blog from the start."

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