# OpenAI kills successful projects when compute has a better use

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/openai-kills-successful-projects-when-compute-has-a-better/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Sam Altman](https://realalpha.app/builders/sam-altman/) · Sam Altman is co-Founder & CEO of OpenAI.
- Host: [Ti Morse](https://realalpha.app/people/ti-morse/) · Host, Relentless · Interviews hard-tech founders on Relentless; guests include Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong and Hadrian's Chris Power.
- Show: Relentless
- Episode: [Sam Altman - How to Start a Startup](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/), Jul 25, 2026
- Moment: 55:12 to 57:45 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/openai-kills-successful-projects-when-compute-has-a-better/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/?t=3312

## Quote

> “And then when Coding Agents started to work recently, **we shut down things like Sora** that we were also really excited about in the browser to really work on this.”
> — [Sam Altman](https://realalpha.app/builders/sam-altman/) at [55:57](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/?t=3357) · Relentless

## Takeaways

1. A project can succeed and still be the wrong priority.
2. OpenAI shifted resources from robotics to GPT-3, then from Sora to coding agents.
3. The team can accept painful changes when they understand the mission.

## About this segment

Sam Altman describes how OpenAI redirected resources from robotics, Sora and other promising projects toward work with greater strategic importance. The hardest cuts come when the project being dropped is already working.

From “Sam Altman - How to Start a Startup”, Jul 25, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[55:19](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/?t=3319) of this type of you know manhattan project how do you most efficiently just stumble through the trees to rapidly figure out what not to work on i mean if something's not working and you run out of ideas you can kill it that's kind of easier the really hard thing is when something is working super well when do you decide to kill the other things to make it work even better so there have been a lot of quite important moments in opening eyes history where one thing started to really work and we killed other good things to make the best thing work better so when gpt3 started to work we shut down Things like robotics, stuff that we're really excited about, to really focus on this.

[56:03](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/?t=3363) And then when Coding Agents started to work recently, we shut down things like Sora that we were also really excited about in the browser to really work on this. And that is difficult to do. Let's say you invest a billion dollars into some new business like Sora. How do you decide whether or not that business is going to become an OpenAI pillar? Oh, it would have been super successful. it was just like it was more important to put the compute and the energy into coding agents take me into one of those meetings like imagine you're in that meeting i guess maybe you were in that meeting where you are saying we've spent a year plus on this thing huge amounts of money huge amounts of compute lots of people and resources a lot of momentum into it people use it they love it and then you decide we're gonna pull the plug like how do you make that call yeah it's not like

[56:52](https://realalpha.app/v/Vv3CEAS_w34/?t=3412) it's not it's not a one meeting thing it's like a i think it's a real it's like a somewhat gradual realization that there is a more important use of this compute these people um you know this product direction and we're going to make a very painful decision to get there how do you realign people once you do have to like kind of kill their baby to move them to another baby people kind of understand the mission and the stakes and the need to reorient to get there so even if they're like unhappy in the moment sometimes they're very happy sometimes like yeah this is the right thing for the mission but even if they're unhappy in the moment they're like i get why we're doing this and the kind of continuing refocus towards super intelligence is like a good thing do you think that there's going to be projects currently that are going to get killed