Sora's failure was not a product problem — it was an arithmetic problem that the product could not escape. The inference cost structure that made Sora unviable sits at the center of a broader question the AI industry has not answered: whether frontier-scale compute can ever be made profitable at consumer price points without either collapsing quality or finding a subsidy. Sora found neither. The $15-18 per 60-second video cost [19] means that a subscriber generating even a handful of videos per month consumes multiples of their subscription revenue in…