> What surprises me a bit is that they'd take this TikTok route, rather than selling Sora as a very expensive storyboarding tool to film/tv studios, producers, etc.

Because it’s not good enough, I would assume. Hard to see it actually being useful in this role.

The query data they are collecting can be used for ad targeting. Remember, if you're not paying for it (and in many cases even when you are paying for it) then the data collected from your use of the application is going to be used by someone to make money one way or another. Google made billions from search queries & OpenAI has an even better query/profiling perspective on its users b/c they are providing all sorts of different modalities for interaction, that data is extremely valuable, analogous to how Google search queries (along w/ data from their other products) are extremely valuable to corporate marketing departments that are willing to pay a premium for access to Google's targeting algorithms.

As a european, i don't know if it's more funny or sad that american citizens close tho data centers are effectively subsidizing ai for the rest of the world by paying more for their electricity since the datacenters are mostly there