The Hacker News community is asking the uncomfortable question: is AI a bubble? A thread this week pulled direct parallels to the Dot Com era, when companies slapped "internet" on their pitch decks without real business models. Commenters noticed the same pattern today. Startups wrap themselves in "AI" branding while lacking clear paths to revenue. The money flowing in feels driven by current investor sentiment more than actual results.
The discussion took a specific turn when someone claimed OpenAI shut down Sora and nixed a Disney deal because compute costs were too high. That claim spread fast. But it's not accurate. Disney did end its partnership with OpenAI involving the Sora text-to-video model. The reason wasn't money. Reports say Disney walked away because the technology produced poor results for marketing and storyboarding. Copyright concerns also played a role. Disney has since moved to build its own in-house generative AI tools instead, which contrasts with the broader instability affecting OpenAI's business partnerships.
Financial sustainability remains a real concern though. Running large models burns cash at alarming rates. One of the highest-voted comments compared AI's current state to nuclear fusion: always promised, never delivered. Others pushed back, arguing that language models already do useful work, even if they're not "intelligence" in the way people imagine. The gap between what AI can do and what companies need it to do keeps showing up in threads like this.
The technology is real. The economics are brutal. Not every partnership survives contact with reality, and Disney choosing to build rather than buy tells you where the actual leverage sits.