Today in AI — 30 March 2026

OpenAI killed Sora, shelved its adult chatbot, renamed its product org to "AGI Deployment," and told staff its next model will "accelerate the economy." That's not a product strategy. It's a controlled demolition of everything that isn't the main bet.

OpenAI clears the decks

Sora was burning $15M/day against $2.1M in total lifetime revenue. With it gone, along with the Disney deal and the adult chatbot, the path is clear for Spud, which finished pretraining and could ship within weeks.

• Why OpenAI really shut down Sora — $15M/day costs, 500K users, and a race it was losing — TechCrunch
• Disney exits $1B OpenAI deal after Sora shutdown — no money ever changed hands — Variety
• CNN: OpenAI thought it could own AI video — the reality was too expensive — CNN Business
• Sora isn't the only thing OpenAI shut down this month — adult chatbot shelved indefinitely too — 9to5Mac
• OpenAI renames product org to 'AGI Deployment,' moves safety oversight away from Altman — Quasa Media
• OpenAI finishes pretraining 'Spud' — Altman says it will 'accelerate the economy' within weeks — The Decoder

Specialists fill the vacuum

ByteDance shipped Seedance 2.0 into CapCut days after Sora died, while domain-specific models from Intercom, Cursor, and Mistral keep beating frontier rivals in their verticals at a fraction of the cost.

• ByteDance rolls out Seedance 2.0 AI video in CapCut as Chinese tools fill the Sora void — WinBuzzer
• Intercom ships Fin Apex 1.0 — a custom model that beats GPT-5.4 and Claude at customer service — VentureBeat
• Cursor launches Composer 2 coding model — beats Claude Opus 4.6 at one-fifth the price — VentureBeat
• Mistral Small 4 ships under Apache 2.0 — 119B parameters, 6B active, matching models 5x its size — Mistral AI

Robotaxis go city by city

Waymo crossed 500,000 paid rides per week, tenfold growth in under two years, while Zoox expands to Austin and Miami and Zagreb prepares for Europe's first commercial robotaxi service.

• Waymo doubles to 500,000 paid rides per week — a tenfold increase in under two years — TechCrunch
• Uber, Pony.ai, and Verne partner to launch Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb — TechCrunch
• Zoox expands to Austin and Miami, quadruples San Francisco service area — TechCrunch

Growth outpacing infrastructure

Anthropic shipped 14+ products in March and suffered five outages; Replit tripled its valuation to $9B in six months. Demand for AI tooling is accelerating faster than the infrastructure underneath.

• Anthropic's 'madcap March' — 14+ launches, 5 outages, and a Claude Mythos leak — The New Stack
• Replit raises $400M at $9B valuation, ships Agent 4 with 10x speed for vibe coding — Replit Blog

Frontier labs are consolidating around their biggest bets. For builders, the opportunity is widest at the edges: vertical models, open-weight alternatives, and domain-specific tools.

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