Elon Musk doubles down on Grok Imagine after OpenAI's Sora shutdown: ‘Future of AI is…’

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has reacted to the shutdown of OpenAI's video generation service, Sora. The billionaire also claimed that video generation tools will be essential for achieving aritificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretcial stage in AI development where the model achieves human level or better understanding in most tasks.

Musk was responded to a post by a user who questioned what was the reason for billionaire to continue to be invested in video generation tools when rivals like OpenAI sht down the Sora service because it was reportedly losing a $1 million per day on it.

The billionaire noted that xAI continues to be heavily involved on video generation via Grok Imagine because he believes it a way to achieve AGI. Musk set his hypotehsis on the idea that because visual data carries a lot more information than text or other inputs.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk said, “The future of AI is primarily video understanding and generation, because photons are by far the highest bandwidth form of communication. These are essential tools for AGI. Worth mentioning that Imagine is positive gross margin for @xAI, not a money loser.”

As per a Wall Street Journal report, OpenAI's Sora app was not only consuming a lot of resources but it was also losing users constantly with the user count of the service peaking at around a million soon after the launch of app but then going go less than 500,000 just a few months later.

Moroever, OpenAI has also been losing ground to the coding tools from Anthropic's Claude which has no image generation or video generation segments within its chatbot. The company has reportedly been looking for areas to deprioritize and Sora became one such tool .

OpenAI has also reportedly been working on developing a ‘superapp’ which will make use agentic AI tools to autonomously executive tasks for users like writing code, analyzing data and booking travel. The new tool could be included by meging ChatGPT desktop app, Codex and Atlas browser.

Elon Musk's bet on Grok Imagine:

In contrast, Musk has been doubling down on Grok Imagine despite the controversies that the tool has landed his company into. Just a few months back, users on X used Grok to generate sexualized deepfake images of women and children.

The controversy led to Musk's chatbot getting temporarily banned in Indonesia and Malaysia while many global governments gave a stern warning to the company. While xAI did eventually make changes to prevent the generation of sexualized images, the chatbot is still often used by users to generate inapproriate content online.

Meanwhile, Musk has not stopped promoting the new Grok Imagine features that his company has announced in the recent days.

Soon after the Sora app shutdown, Musk wrote on X, "The next @Grok Imagine release will be epic. We are doubling down."