Why OpenAI Killed Sora, and Google Owns AI Video

Rank the three generative-media frontiers — image, video and voice — by how much compute each burns per second of output, and you get a near-perfect map of the AI race.

Video is so ruinously expensive that OpenAI switched Sora off — the same chips earn it a thousand times more writing code — leaving Google's Veo almost alone against a wall of Chinese labs like Kuaishou's Kling and ByteDance's Seedance.

Images are cheap enough to sustain a crowded, genuinely competitive field; voice, cheapest of all, quietly belongs to a startup. Compute intensity is destiny.

This episode follows that logic all the way down to the mathematics of the transformer itself — why a picture costs a thousand re-readings of the same paragraph rather than a thousand words, why video's quadratic attention makes it explode, and why voice is the cheap frontier everyone underrates.

And it explains what all of it reveals about Google: the one Western company that owns its chips (TPUs), its data (YouTube), and its distribution, and so can afford to play across the whole spectrum while everyone else has to choose — all the way to world models, where generative video merges with the race to AGI.

I'm Dan. AI moves too fast to keep up with, so I built my own stack of AI tools to research, analyse, verify and illustrate the questions I can't stop thinking about — mostly to learn it myself, and I share what I find. AI-assisted, fact-checked, worth a second look.

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The full written report — with the charts, sources and interactive exhibits — is on the site: read it here. Browse every episode and all of Dan's shows at connectiveshift.com.

This show is AI-generated and fact-checked — deeply researched, and worth a second look. Follow Dan's AI Intel — it's free, and the single best way to help a small independent show grow. Thoughts or pushback? [email protected] — I read every one.