What You Kill > What You Build

OpenAI killed Sora

Not sunsetted. Killed.

The product they hyped as the next ChatGPT.

The one Disney was about to invest a billion dollars around.

The one that was supposed to turn OpenAI into the creative engine of the AI era.

Gone in an afternoon.

The reason is almost boring in how obvious it is. Sora was eating compute - the most expensive resource on earth right now - while Anthropic was running away with the market that actually matters.

Every user splicing themselves into a Hollywood chase scene was burning chips that could've been training the models OpenAI needed to stay in the race.

Usage peaked at about a million users and never came back. The economics were brutal. And every week they kept it alive was a week they fell further behind on the things that would actually determine whether OpenAI survives the next two years.

Sam Altman called it a "difficult trade-off."

It wasn't difficult. It was obvious.

They just didn't want to admit it for six months.

5,049 lines deleted

Today I pushed a pull request on Founder Reality. 84 files changed. 5,049 lines deleted. 177 added.

I killed the forum.

Killed Founder Simulation.

Killed the Honest Money section.

Killed the investing page.

Nobody was using any of it.

I built it because I could, not because anyone needed it.

The forum had been dead for months. I kept it running because I'd built it.

Because removing it felt like going backwards. Because maybe someone would start posting tomorrow.

Nobody was coming tomorrow.

The trap

Adding feels like progress. That's the trap.

A new feature. A new section. A new product. Every addition comes with a little hit of optimism. Every removal triggers the feeling that you're shrinking.

But OpenAI has more resources than almost any company on earth and they still couldn't afford to spread compute across things that felt cool but didn't compound. If they can't afford distraction, I definitely can't.

Every feature I maintained was time I wasn't spending on content.

Every dead product on my site was cognitive overhead for someone visiting for the first time and trying to figure out what this place actually is.

So I ripped it out. All of it.

Replaced every "Post to the forum" prompt across 16 weeks of content with one word: Reflect.

Because that's what actually mattered. Not performing your learning in a dead forum thread. Thinking for yourself.

Clarity, not failure

The Sora story isn't a failure story. It's a clarity story.

They looked at what was working, looked at what wasn't, and chose. That's it. The hard part was never the decision. The hard part was admitting they should've made it months earlier.

5,049 lines deleted. The site is faster. The experience is cleaner. And I stopped pretending things were going to magically start working.

Addition is easy. Subtraction is strategy.