Sam Altman hooked himself on TikTok on purpose to study the algorithm while OpenAI was building Sora, then deleted the app because it worked too well on him, he said on the “Relentless” podcast. Ten minutes of winding down before bed turned into an hour, then a Saturday afternoon he spent three hours on the couch, and Altman said he knew the habit was bad for him even while enjoying it like a drug. He got back down to five or ten minutes a night before dropping it altogether. OpenAI quit the category too, scrapping the Sora video app in March roughly six months after launch, since generating video ate compute the company wanted elsewhere. Altman brought the story up while discussing the device OpenAI is building with Jony Ive, promised before year end and meant to cut through notification noise rather than farm attention.
