The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora

What mad world are we living in where Disney — Disney — is paying someone to lose control over its IP?

I think they're getting some equity in return for the investment. If it goes up, Disney makes out. If it doesn't, well, ...

The alternative is they make no money and people still produce them using other video gen tools without the copyright filters.

Similar to the music industry piracy battle, it makes more sense to work with the big platforms than fight them.

Why not equity in exchange for rights? The crazy thing is they're surrendering both rights and cash.

There are many alternatives. Another is they sue the shit out of Open AI until you basically can't generate anything related to mice or monarchies.

This may be the right move but it's by no means forced.

Maybe the negotiations established that the rights were worth $X, but Disney wanted $X + 1 billion worth of stock?

While many startups will take anyone's money, it can be hard to invest in some. And the most desirable are the hardest. So maybe Disney was using the IP negotiations to open the door?

I don’t see the similarity here.

When music piracy was facilitated by corporate entities like Napster, the rights holders sued them out of existence, after which piracy evolved into a highly distributed problem that was too costly to prosecute (you can’t sue everyone using BitTorrent one by one). Yes, eventually the music rights holders did facilitate commercial distribution, starting with the iTunes Store, and it was successful because they satisfied the market’s key demand that customers be able to buy one song as a time for 99c, as opposed to the whole album, which would often cost upwards of $10. Also, they didn’t let customers modify the songs or make derivative works.

Generating Disney-derived content with AI, on the other hand, requires massive resources that most individuals don’t possess, thus making corporate entities all but essential players in the game. (This may change in a few years as technology improves, but we shall see.) And we’re talking about derivative works here, not mere copies.

Are they losing control though? OpenAI did sign a contract with them and that presumably gives them some power. Maybe less than the power they had over, for example netflix, but still more than nothing.

P.S. If you can't win them, join them ...

Disney isn't "paying someone," they're expecting to make money. They're investing.

The $1B turns into OpenAI stock. If Disney characters make OpenAI more valuable, that stock and its future dividends become more valuable.

Buying GPUs and RAM is a bit of a barrier right now, but renting a cloud instance at Modal and running a model off hugging face is relatively affordable

Disney has been a wannabe tech company for the longest of times. They started the streaming Wars with Disney+ and have had massive spend on AI already. There is virtually no creative or artistic talent left in the company.

Isn't Disney on of the oldest tech companies of all time?

The engineering that goes into their parks is insane, and they have been consistently pushing live experiences. The logistics that goes on in the background to let as many people as possible have a good experience is also insane.

And that's just Disneyland. There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.

Toy Story was essentially a tech demo for Pixar. And they worked alongside Apple to make the Squeak Smalltalk programming language.

As I recall, Randy Pausch had a lot of positive things to say about Disney Imagineering.

Pixar was bought by Disney years after it was already a movie powerhouse. Toy Story was released in 1995; Disney acquired Pixar in 2006.

Disney monetizing the loss of control that was happening anyway

> There's a guy on youtube who makes fascinating hour-long documentaries about every aspect of Disneyland.

you can't nerdsnipe me like that and NOT drop a link. :p

what's the channel?

Not OP but if you do wanna see some good youtube that shows what Disney knows about computering, the Disney research hub is super fun: https://www.youtube.com/@DisneyResearchHub/videos

I remember when I first saw Stickman in 2018 I thought it would be amazing if they continued it all the way out, they went pretty far with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFtNcGnroa8 to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGOY4KaLLNw

If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.

Not your parent, but I'd expect they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defunctland

His recent videos on Imagineering's animatronics and "Living Characters" was incredible.

What open-weight model comes close to the quality of Sora 2 and can run on hardware mere mortals can afford?