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Forbes Daily Briefing

The OpenAI Graveyard: All The Deals And Products That Haven’t Happened

Forbes Daily Briefing

Forbes

News, Business, Tech News

4.418 Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here are all the products and deals that OpenAI announced which haven’t lived up to the hype, whether it’s because they’re dead, delayed or still to be determined. Sora and Disney In March, OpenAI announced it was shuttering the product and scrapping the deal. Adoption of Sora, which was guzzling compute and burning an estimated $15 million a day at its peak, had fallen off a cliff. Sensor Tower and Appfigures both estimated that Sora’s lifetime in-app revenue amounted to less than $3 million. OpenAI will also discontinue Sora’s associated AI models.  “As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere,” Disney spokesperson Mike Long told Forbes. NSFW mode in ChatGPT Altman first proposed the idea of allowing verified adult users to have sexual conversations with ChatGPT in October. After facing intense pushback from internal staff as well as investors, the plans have been put on hold “indefinitely,” the Financial Times reported in March. The company had previously delayed the launch due to technical issues that come with training an AI model that forays into erotica without creating illegal content, like child sexual abuse material. OpenAI confirmed the report and said it wants to do long-term research on the effects of sexually explicit chats on users before making a decision. Instant Checkout for Shopping In early March, OpenAI pulled the plug, discontinuing the Instant Checkout feature. Instead, shoppers can now browse and buy products from dedicated apps within ChatGPT, including from Walmart’s own chatbot Sparky. OpenAI said it wants to focus on helping people browse and search for products and give sellers control over checkout. “We’ve found that the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide,” the company said in a blog post. GPT-4o  In February, OpenAI officially sunsetted its wildly popular GPT-4o model. Known for its warm, giddy, playful personality, 4o was also problematically “overly sycophantic" and excessively agreeable. OpenAI temporarily brought it back shortly after first killing it in August in response to backlash from people who had grown attached to the model and were enraged that it was being discontinued. “BRING BACK 4o,” one Reddit user wrote. “GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend.” Stargate  On the first full day of President Trump’s second term, OpenAI announced the $500 billion Project Stargate in partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build AI data centers across the country. The high-profile announcement took place at the White House, where Altman was flanked by tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Masayoshi Son on one side and Trump on the other.  Nvidia In September, both companies touted a headline-grabbing promise that Nvidia “intends” to invest up to $100 billion into OpenAI. The agreement had no timeline attached to it, and now it seems like OpenAI may only ever see $30 billion of it if OpenAI goes public soon, per comments from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in March. Nvidia’s latest annual report, filed at the end of February, provided even more of a hedge: “There is no assurance that we will enter into an investment and partnership agreement with OpenAI or that a transaction will be completed.” AMDA month after announcing a potential $100 billion deal with Nvidia, OpenAI unveiled a parallel agreement with Nvidia’s arch-rival, AMD. The deal was marketed as 160 million of AMD shares, or about 10% of the company, in exchange for OpenAI outfitting six gigawatts’ worth of data center capacity with AMD chips. Read the full story on Forbes: By Phoebe Liu, and Rashi Shrivastava. https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/31/openai-graveyard-deals-and-products-havent-happened-openai/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:55.7

Find out more at electoralcommission.org.uket slash voter ID. Today on Forbes, the OpenAI Graveyard,

1:04.6

all the deals and products that haven't happened. In January, OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fiji Simo, defended OpenAI's

1:14.8

Spaghetti-At-the-Wall product approach, ads, shopping, health, a social network, browser,

1:21.6

physical devices, video generation, and an app store like Marketplace, as variations on the same theme.

1:29.3

At the time, Simo told Forbes, quote, AI is going to transform everything, and so we don't

1:35.1

really think of these as completely separate bets.

1:38.8

But just two months later, OpenAI reversed course on its flashiest initiative yet, its once viral, beloved

1:46.2

by some, Sora video model, and app, and a quote, landmark licensing deal with Disney that

1:52.7

was set to include a $1 billion equity investment.

1:57.0

The retreat points to a strategic shift toward more financial discipline within the company.

2:01.6

Facing pressure to build products that actually make money ahead of a potential upcoming

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