A few days ago, OpenAI said it would shut down Sora, the text-to-image and text-to-video AI feature, just a few weeks after announcing a major 10-figure deal with Disley, and days after announcing full integration with ChatGPT.

The problem is that Sora was simply too expensive to justify.

According to rumours, it was costing OpenAI around $1.30 for every 10-second video it generated, which translated to around $5.4 billion a year just in operating costs.

So they pulled the plug.

xAI and X, so basically Grok, aren't doing the same thing, but they have decided to do something about it.

As of March 19, 2026, Grok Imagine is no longer free.

Which means you can no longer generate images or videos with Grok.

After introducing Grok Imagine, xAI turned Grok into a text-only AI assistant, as all image-generating features were moved to Grok Imagine.

At first, you could create images and videos (up to six seconds) with Grok Imagine, but that's gone now.

In order to use Grok Imagine, you now have to subscribe to SuperGrok Lite for $10 a month or SuperGrok for $30 a month for higher resolution and longer videos.

This isn't the end, I'm absolutely sure.

AI companies are coming to terms with the fact that AI is way too expensive, way too unprofitable, and use cases are limited.

Aside from a few exceptions (self-driving cars, maybe?), so far, we've only seen AI being used to generate silly images, write captions for Instagrams and bios for Tinder, and generate replies to boring work emails.

That's hardly history-making stuff, is it?