• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Outgoing Disney CEO Bob Iger's last decision -- a massive deal with ever rising Open AI -- seemed to breach the wall of creativity that longtime critics assumed could harm the brand.

Now that the deal is seemingly over, we ask: Was that the real reason to pull the plug on the deal?

Not exactly, says Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, which pulled the plug on its video-generation tool Sora -- where the Disney deal was anchored.

Supply-and-demand issues forced Altman to cut down on Sora due to rapidly growing "compute" power needs for other parts of the company, like ChatGPT.

In an interview with journalist Laurie Segall for her new “Mostly Human” podcast, he said the decision was a close one, that a rapidly changing marketplace forced Open AI to trim back resources for Sora.

But all is not lost. Altman says: “I love Sora, I love generated videos, and I love our partnership with Disney, and we’re working hard with them to find a world where they can still do something amazing, and we can help with that.”

But compute power wasn’t the only reason. Demand for Sora -- and its new association where Disney loyal fans would create new videos using some 200 characters -- would have caused Open AI to see dramatic growth. Too fast.

“One thing that we had realized is that to succeed with it as the product was currently conceptualized in this way, you could watch a lot of videos, that would have put a series of incentives on us, and would have led to a bunch of decisions to win that we just didn’t want to make.”

Creative executives were highly concerned about the initial Sora consumer-produced videos -- before the Disney deal -- breaching "brand safety" and some copyright issues. That said, it was expected that Disney would be putting in very specific safeguards and guidelines.

Disney has a long history with protecting its IP (intellectual property). Iger would not have done the deal if this had not been in place.

Still, Open AI needed to have a hand in this as well.

Altman says the main issue then was potentially explosive volume of interest -- with the likes of popular video products from Disney.

Now, he wants to find another way to work with a big media company and its IP.

What could that be? We aren’t sure.

Altman says the company debated simply folding Sora into ChatGPT.

If not for Disney's additional $1 billion investment in Open AI, Altman may still want to find a way -- hopefully before Anthropic or other AI product-driven companies with video products jump the line.

Perhaps Open AI would find some sort of corporate shift. We wonder if a more core Open AI ChatGPT association with Disney is still possible.