TL;DR
Altman said he became “addicted” to TikTok while studying it for Sora. He eliminated it after a three-hour Saturday session. OpenAI killed Sora in March. The company says ChatGPT is designed not to trap users.
Sam Altman deleted TikTok because I couldn’t stop using it. The CEO of OpenAI said about “Relentless“Podcast who forced himself to learn the app while OpenAI built Sora, its AI-generated video social network.”I became addicted to TikTok because I just wanted to learn.“he said. It started with 10 minutes before bed. Then it was an hour. Then it was three hours on a Saturday afternoon.”I was really enjoying it at the time like a drug.” he said. He deleted the app.
OpenAI also removed Sora. The company scrapped the app in March after about six months, deciding that generating video was too compute-intensive at a time when Anthropic and other competitors were further pushing the AI frontier race. Sora had attracted a partnership with Disney and significant attention, but the economics didn’t work out. It’s hard to miss the parallel: Altman found TikTok too consuming to sustain it, and OpenAI found Sora too consuming to sustain it.
Altman discussed the experience in the context of the Jony Ive AI device, which OpenAI has said it will introduce before the end of the year. Altman has said he wants the device to eliminate the notification noise that makes phones seem “walking through Times Square.” Google rebuilt search around AI roundups to keep users within its ecosystem for longer. Altman argues that OpenAI should do the opposite: create a product that people use briefly and walk away. “Instead of measuring success by time spent or clicks, we care more about whether you leave the product after you’ve done what you came here for.”OpenAI said last August.
The admission is telling because it comes from the person building the artificial intelligence systems that power the next generation of recommendation algorithms. Altman experienced firsthand that TikTok’s algorithm is, in his words, “too powerful” and that even someone who understood exactly what was happening couldn’t resist it. Wharton researchers found that people accept AI results 80% of the timeeven when I’m wrong. TikTok’s algorithm is not bad. He’s right about what keeps you looking. The CEO of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence company couldn’t have outsmarted her. This is the most honest product review TikTok has ever received.
