ONE · WHAT IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING Sora is being retired in two stages, and the first one has already happened. The app and the website stopped working on the twenty-sixth of April. What survived that is the way other software reaches the model, and OpenAI has published the date it goes: the twenty-fourth of September. That covers the video service and every version of the model behind it, the standard one, the pro one, and the dated snapshots people pinned their work to. The detail worth sitting with is not the date. It is the column next to it. OpenAI's page is laid out in three columns, and the third is headed recommended replacement. For most retirements it is filled in. The old chat models point at the current ones. The old completion models point at where to go. For Sora, that column holds a dash. There is no successor announced, no numbered follow-up, no date for one. The company has said it is putting its attention elsewhere. A dash in that column is not an oversight, it is the answer.  GO TO THE SOURCE The table is here. Find the September rows and read across, because the third column is the part that will decide your next month. It is worth scrolling past Sora while you are there. The twenty-eighth of September takes the old completion models. The twenty-third of October takes a long list of the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 generation along with anything fine-tuned on top of them. If you have a workflow you have not touched in a year, that last row is the one to check. TWO · WHY A MODEL WITH NO SUCCESSOR IS DIFFERENT Most retirements are a rename. The thing you were using becomes a newer thing with the same shape, your prompts mostly survive, and the migration is an afternoon. This is not that. When a model line ends with no successor, everything you learned about steering it stops being portable, because the next model is somebody else's and it was trained differently. Which makes this a good moment to notice what your prompts were actually made of. A prompt that says cinematic, 35mm, shallow depth of field, golden hour is describing a photograph and will carry to any model that understands photographs. A prompt that leans on a quirk you discovered by accident, a phrase that only worked because of how one model was tuned, carries nowhere. The first kind is craft. The second kind was always rented. The reason given for the retirement is worth knowing too, because it is not technical. The service cost more to run than it brought in. That is a sentence that will be true of other tools you use, and the tell is always the same: heavy compute, generous limits, no obvious way the numbers close. THREE · WHERE THE WORK GOES Three places absorbed most of the people who left, and they are not interchangeable. Veo is the closest in temperament to what Sora was doing, steadiest on physical plausibility and on sound that belongs to the shot. Kling holds a character across cuts where the others drift and is the one to try when continuity is the whole job. Runway is the one built as a room to work in rather than a box to type into, which matters more than raw quality once you are doing revisions. Do not pick on a chart. Take one shot you already made, one you know intimately and can judge in a second, and run it through all three before the twenty-fourth. You are not measuring quality, you are measuring which one misunderstands you least, and that is personal enough that no comparison table can answer it for you. And do the boring thing first. Anything of yours still sitting inside a service that is winding down should be on your own drive this week, not in September. Export windows have a way of being shorter than announced, and the material you made is the one part of this that nobody else can regenerate for you. PROMPT OF THE DAY The one that moves a shot to a model that has never seen it. Reach for this when a prompt worked somewhere that is closing and you need it to work somewhere else. Paste your old prompt in after the instruction. Here is a video prompt written for one model. Rewrite it for a different model that has never seen it. Do it in three passes and show me each. First pass, strip out every word that is a habit rather than a description: model names, version numbers, settings, and any phrase you cannot explain the visual effect of. Second pass, rebuild what is left as things a camera and a set can do, so subject, action, lens, distance, light, motion of the camera, and duration, each stated once. Third pass, mark any line that survived only because I asserted it rather than described it, and tell me what it would look like if a stranger read it with no idea what I was going for. Do not add style words that were not in my original. The load-bearing pass is the third. The first two produce something tidy, and tidy is easy to mistake for portable. The third is where you find the line that was never really a description, the one that only ever worked because a particular model happened to agree with you. THE NEXT WORKING NOTE Every tool you use is somebody's line item. That is not cynicism, it is just the arithmetic underneath a service that gives you a large amount of compute for a monthly figure. The ones that close tend to give the same warning in advance, which is generosity that never quite explains itself, and the useful response is not suspicion but portability. Keep your prompts describable. Keep your output on your own drive. Then a shutdown date is an inconvenience rather than a loss. I am putting together a five model switch sheet: the same shot written for each of the current video models, with the lines that had to change marked and a note on what each one reliably misreads, each with a worked example. Built so moving a shot takes ten minutes instead of an evening. Want it when it ships? Reply with send me the switch sheet and I will get it to you. A QUESTION FOR YOU Did you have anything inside Sora, and did you get it out. I am asking because I suspect a fair number of us meant to and then did not, and if that is common it is worth a whole issue on getting your material off services before you need to. | 
