When it comes to R&D, those are all very similar. Sora is another way to predict tokens, if you will. It's not like you have to choose that much: Sora is not using up all the compute that should've went to GPT-5. (It might not even be training in the same cluster; it might train on a separate set of GPUs which are useless for GPT-5 purposes because they are too small and the datacenter in question is tapped out.) Sora can't be GPT-5, but it could lead to a GPT-6. You have the Gato approach of tokenizing video into a stream of text tokens with RL, but you might instead wind up taking a more complex diffusion approach to video. Yet the goal is still the same: to control the world and solve things like robotics by predicting. And if you want to reach the goal as quickly as possible, you will try things in parallel, even if you know most of them will fail and you might wind up just doing the obvious thing you expected to do from the start. (After all, the whole reason we are here is that OA didn't throw 100% of its compute into big PPO runs doing DRL research, but Alec Radford was allowed to keep tinkering away with RNNs for predicting text, which led to GPT-1 and then GPT-2 etc.)
If I was going to nitpick I would point out that it's not necessarily the GPUs that Sora is consuming, it's the engineering effort from what could be called the top talent in AI and the vast amount of money OpenAI is borrowing that could be spent elsewhere.
> And if you want to reach the goal as quickly as possible, you will try things in parallel
This is sort of the exploration-exploitation problem, right? But I think you'd agree that a company full of people who firmly believe that GPT-(n+1) will literally be AGI, and that we're on an exponential curve, will be fully in exploitation mode. In my mind, exploring methods of generating videos is not a path towards their stated goal of AGI. Instead, it's an avenue to _earn money now_. OpenAI is in a slightly awkward position: their main product (ChatGPT) is not super useful right now, and is facing increasingly viable competition.
