Sora Is Gone and the Tool That Replaced It Was Already Ready (AI Video News 2026)

Open AI killed a billion dollar deal, a man stole eight million from Spotify,

a motorcycle bug is building an AI version of himself.

Welcome to another completely normal week in AI. Let's discuss.

Welcome to the most prolific AI marketing podcast on the internet right now,

the inner nutshell podcast. This is the daily 10 minute podcast where I take out all of the

techie talk around generative AI and focus on what the everyday person, content creator,

and marketing wants to hear. I've only got 10 minutes so I can only focus on one subject.

And it's Friday. It's Friday. Yes, it's Friday. And this is why I talk about the news.

What's been going on in the world of AI this week? And to be honest, there's only one place to start.

That is Rest in Peace. Sora. The tool that everyone was going crazy for, I think the beginning

of 2024, I remember seeing the trailers and what it can do. And it was a huge leap in the world

of AI video and showed other people what's possible. The problem that they had was they just had

trailers. And by the time it was released 10 months later in 2020, well, tumors towards Christmas

of 2024, about four or five other tools had come out and could do that. So Sora was always playing

catch up and eventually playing catch up caught up to them. Now, when it was finally released to

people, it done really well. It hit number one on the app store. It clocked up millions of downloads.

And this was just in under five days. And recently, and I mentioned this probably about six

months ago, they had a Disney deal on the table worth a billion dollars. But still open AI pulled the

plug just mumps in. The reason? Economics. So it always usually goes down to money. And so it's

just costing them a lot of money. It's just unsustainable. And they're probably looking to IPO soon.

So with an IPO on the horizon, the compute costs had to go somewhere more profitable.

And you might say a billion dollar deal from Disney is profitable. But

but long term, I don't know, that billion dollars will go quite quick. Now, the tech is not

being buried though. They've shut down Sora, but the actual tech is not being buried. Apparently,

it's being directed or redirected into training robots. So the future of Sora is not necessarily

going to be the next short film. It could be in a warehouse somewhere learning how to pick up boxes.

Because chat GPT in other news this week, what they're doing or open AI is merging chat GPT,

their browser or a built in browser. I'm not sure if it's Atlas or another one that they're working

on. And the code generator into a single desktop app. So the days of tabs switching between your AI

and your work are kind of fading fast. That's what they want to do. You're seeing more and more

AI companies really focus on the apps. So right now, just looking on my laptop, I've got the whisper

app open. I've got the Claude app open. I've got the original chat GPT app open. Today, I had to

sign up to Manus's app because you're getting more credits or crit. Well, you could do a job for

half the amount of credits that you spend if you download or if you do it via their new app. So

it looks like they're really pushing for desktop apps and chat GPT. And one of the reasons why

they stopped Sora is because they want to focus on some of the more what they believe profitable

projects. And it looks like combining everyone and everyone in the ecosystem because they see it

works for Apple. They're going to think it's going to be worth it for them. So this is less of a

feature update. It's more of a platform land grab. But by stopping Sora at the same time,

that is a coincidence. Bright dance. They've quietly dropped one of the most capable AI video

models on the market right now, which is C dance 2.0. The platform I've been talking about for a

number of weeks now. Ever since we started seeing it online and what it was capable of doing.

Also, the last two weeks on the news I've been talking about it being sued and being stopped in

season desists from everyone as well. But I don't think I stop in them because you can get C dance

inside CapCut. And CapCut's already got millions of creators editing every day.

CapCut will support your text, image, audio, prompts and inputs. Meaning the days of building

video from scratches getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So I'm looking forward to playing

with this within CapCut. This might be another reason why Sora stopped because they're struggling

to compete with the likes of C dance. And Google, even though Google for the last year pretty much

has dominated the video space with their VO model. They need to watch out because a lot of the

big directors and producers, they're switching to C dance from what I'm seeing. Now this next

new story I shared today on my WhatsApp group. Now if you don't know, I've got a WhatsApp broadcast

list where every day I keep you up to date with the news. So if you want to stay up to date with

the news, rather than once a week, if you want to know every day what's going on, join my WhatsApp

community. Now it's a community not a group. So only I compost. So if you join, you're not getting

50, 60 notifications every two hours. It's just one usually round about midday every week day.

And it's just three or four pieces of the news. So if you want to find it, go to my website

AndrewMiles Davis.com Davis Spelt DAV IS. Go to the menu bar at the top, go to resources,

click on WhatsApp and you can join in. And as I said, one of the news I'll be sharing today

is a man who stole eight million pounds from Spotify using AI. Got caught. So this 54-year-old man

from North Carolina, he created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs, built thousands of

butter counts and streamed his own music billions of times to collect royalty from Spotify, Apple

and Amazon. He made over eight million dollars doing this before he got caught, of course.

Now he's gone to court and he's actually pleaded guilty. He's pleaded guilty to wire fraud

and will be sentenced this summer. So I'll keep you up to date with what he actually got.

But this is the first federal conviction of its kind. And I can't see it being the last.

Talking about a guy that's been in court a lot this week, Mark Zuckerberg. Now,

he is secretly training a personal AI agent, not for meta customer service or meta customers,

not for developers, but of himself. And he wants to do this to help him run the company.

He wants this agent to read his emails, summarize what needs attention, handle all this pressure

of being CEO so he can focus on bigger decisions. Now, whether that excites or unsettles you,

depends entirely on how much you trust this man. He's already running one of the most powerful

companies on Earth. So to have an AI co-pilot that thinks like him is a good thing or is that a bad

thing? Further low, you decide. But the concept, I can see a lot more people doing. Imagine having

an AI version of you to help you work or to help you do other things that you know when you've

always said, ah, could do with an extra pair of hands. That's why he's doing it.

Talking about an extra pair of hands, the head of BlackRock. Now, I'm going to talk about BlackRock,

but don't worry, I'm not going to go into some of the things that you might hear about BlackRock,

but the head of BlackRock, which if you don't know is the world's largest asset manager.

He told the BBC recently that, well, this week, that society overdid the push towards the

university degrees and white collar careers, and AI is now proving that point. His message,

really more plumbers, more electricians, fewer lawyers, and BlackRock, you know, they're putting

their money where their mouth is and they're putting $100 million into skill trade programs to back

up what he's saying. Now, I don't know about the whole AI is now proving a point because society

pushed people towards the university degree because they've been doing that for the last 30,

40 years. So I'd very much doubt 30, 40 years ago, people were thinking when that was happening,

people were saying, oh, it's not worth it because AI is going to come along and replace jobs.

I'd very much doubt that. But it does have a point about skilled labour. And last week I spoke

about jobs that's been affected and jobs that won't. So plumbers, skilled trades people,

electricians, they'll be charging soon what lawyers charge now. But will they be working on a

Friday? No. A Gartner analyst suggested banning Microsoft co-pilot on Friday afternoons.

Why? Because by then, people are too tired to check what it actually produces.

This is not a technical problem. This seems to be a human one. And he believes that

because we're too tired to check the output, it will still create things that are factually fine,

but culturally offensive. And nobody's going to catch this. I'm not sure about that one.

But, like I've always said, time will tell. So in a nutshell, that was the news this week.