Overview Sora is OpenAI's text to video model, first unveiled in a February 2024 research preview that reset industry expectations for what AI video could look like. The demo clips — a woman walking through a rainy Tokyo street, a stylized wooly mammoth crossing a plain, a paper airplane flying through a jungle — were the moment generative video moved from "interesting" to "commercially plausible." Sora shipped to consumers via ChatGPT Plus in late 2024, and Sora 2 in 2026 extended the model from 60 second clips to feature short lengths of up to five minutes. Positioning wise, Sora is the raw fidelity engine. Where Runway wins on the editing surface and Pika on the accessible price, Sora wins on the single question of "how good does the generation look before you touch it." Composition is cinematic. Motion physics are the strongest of any consumer facing video model. Character consistency across a scene holds better than any competitor. And the fact that it lives inside ChatGPT — the same account as GPT 5, DALL E, Whisper, and Advanced Voice — makes it the only frontier video model available as a feature of an assistant subscription rather than a standalone product. The trade is that Sora is a model with a chat wrapper, not a video production tool. There is no Motion Brush. There is no Camera Control with numeric parameters. There is no timeline editor. Iteration is conversational: you describe the shot, review the output, describe the fix, review again.…