Sora Left a Crater in the Compute Budget and Nobody Can Agree Who Fills It

Hayden Field put it plainly in a post that circulated widely on Bluesky this week: {{entity:sora|Sora}} consumed a massive amount of compute and never produced the financial return to justify it. The post was framed as a eulogy of sorts, but what gave it traction — 41 likes and a stream of agreement in the replies — wasn't the grief. It was the second part: that Sora's brief existence has permanently eroded trust in our ability to judge what's real. Two consequences from one product that never really worked. That combination of wasted infrastructure and lasting epistemic damage is the {{beat:ai-hardware-compute|AI hardware}} story right now, and the conversation hasn't figured out how to hold both parts at once. The question Field's post raised — how much compute is too much, and who absorbs the loss when a bet fails — has been circulating in lower-key form across the rest of the week's conversation. A Bluesky user offered the bleakest scenario: when the AI boom unwinds, it won't be a clean crash but something stranger, a