Hy4 preview vs Sora 2: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Sora 2 — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.
Sora 2
OpenAI
A text-to-video model from OpenAI that generates realistic videos, integrated into the Sora app with built-in safety and provenance metadata.
Key features
- Text-to-Video Generation: Produces realistic videos from natural-language prompts, enabling users to generate scenes, actions, and cinematic compositions directly from text.
- C2PA Provenance Metadata: Every Sora-generated video includes C2PA metadata that identifies the video as model-generated to improve transparency and enable origin verification.
- Sora App Integration: Sora 2 is integrated into a dedicated Sora app and ChatGPT workflows to enable interactive, collaborative creation and distribution within OpenAI's product ecosystem.
- Built-in Safety Controls: Safety measures are incorporated from launch, including content moderation guardrails and features to reduce misuse during generation.
- Parental and Account Controls: New parental controls in ChatGPT allow guardians to manage teen permissions (DMs, feed personalization) and restrict certain Sora app features.
- System Card & Documentation: OpenAI published a Sora 2 System Card detailing model capabilities, safety mitigations, and deployment approach for transparency and developer understanding.
- Platform Availability & API Status: Available via OpenAI's Sora app/ChatGPT integrations at launch; OpenAI indicated tailored pricing and broader access plans, while a public Sora API was not available initially.
- High-fidelity text-to-video generation from natural language prompts
- Companion Sora app for creation and collaborative workflows
- Built-in provenance metadata (C2PA) attached to generated videos
- Safety-first design including parental controls and non-personalized feed options
- Integration surface with OpenAI ecosystem (ChatGPT links and developer platform references)
- Published system card and explanatory documentation on capabilities and safety
- Tailored pricing and enterprise-focused plans (pricing details announced by OpenAI)
Best for
- Marketing & Ads: Rapidly create short promotional videos and social content from marketing copy for ads, product highlights, and campaign variants.
- Previsualization & Storyboarding: Filmmakers and creators can generate rough video drafts and storyboards from script descriptions to iterate on shots and pacing.
- Social Content Creation: Users collaborate in the Sora app to produce and share short-form creative videos for social platforms without advanced production tools.
- Educational & Training Materials: Generate illustrative video examples, demonstrations, and explainer clips for e-learning, training, and presentations.
- Prototype Product Demos: Produce quick product concept or feature demos to visualize UX flows, animations, and scenarios for internal reviews or investor decks.
- Research & World Simulation: Researchers can use Sora 2 for experiments in video generation, scene understanding, and simulated environments to study model behavior and realism.
- Marketing and social content creation: rapid generation of short promotional videos from text briefs
- Storyboarding and previsualization: visualize scene ideas with text prompts
- Educational and training content: generate illustrative videos for lessons
- Prototype and concept demos: produce quick video demos for product pitches
- Entertainment and short-form media generation for apps and creators