Sora, one of OpenAI’s video generator co-leads, has left for Google.
Tim Brooks, who led the development of Sora with William Peebles, announced in a post on
“We spent two amazing years building Sora at OpenAI,” Brooks wrote. “Thank you to all the passionate and friendly people I worked with.”
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis welcomed Brooks in a response to world simulator It’s a somewhat vague and ill-defined phrase, but DeepMind has applied it to models like the recently released Genie. Genie can create playable, motion-controlled virtual worlds from composite images, real photos, and even sketches.
Here’s how DeepMind researchers explain it in a 2023 paper: “Applications of real-world simulators range from creating controllable content in games and movies to training purely simulated agents that can be deployed directly in the real world.”
Brooks was one of the first to work on Sora, launching a project at OpenAI in January 2023. Brooks claims on his LinkedIn that he led the project’s research direction and model training.
His departure reportedly comes as the yet-to-be-released Sora is experiencing technical difficulties that leave it poorly positioned compared to competing systems such as Luma and Runway. The original system, Per The Information, released last February, took more than 10 minutes of processing time to create a one-minute video. OpenAI is in the process of training an improved Sora that can quickly create clips, sources told The Information.
Google has its own video creation model, Veo, which it unveiled at its annual I/O developer conference this spring and will soon be added to YouTube’s short video format, YouTube Shorts, which will allow creators to create backgrounds and six-second clips. .
In addition to technology-related hurdles, OpenAI appears to have ceded valuable partnership ground to video-generation challengers in recent months. Earlier this month, Runway signed a deal with Lionsgate, the studio behind the “John Wick” franchise, to train custom video models from Lionsgate’s catalog of films. About a week later, Stability, which is developing its own set of video creation models, added “Avatar,” “Terminator” and “Titanic” director James Cameron to its board.
OpenAI reportedly held meetings with filmmakers and Hollywood studios to demonstrate Sora earlier this year. Former CTO Mira Murati was in attendance at Cannes, where the company teamed up with several independent directors and select brands to showcase the system’s capabilities.
However, OpenAI has not yet announced any long-term collaborations with any major producers.
Brooks — In a strange situation, he actually coming back It’s the latest in a series of high-profile resignations from OpenAI — including one at Google who once worked on the company’s Pixel phones.
CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph announced their departure from the company at the end of September. Renowned research scientist Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI in February. A few months later, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned, along with former safety chief Jan Leike. Last August, co-founder John Schulman said he would be leaving OpenAI. And the company’s president, Greg Brockman, is on sabbatical.
