One of the leaders involved in creating OpenAI video, Sora, has left for Google.
Tim Brooks, who was heading Sora’s development with William Peebles, announced in a… mail X said he would join Google DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence research division, to work on video creation technologies and “world simulators.”
“I had a wonderful two years at OpenAI making Sora,” Brooks wrote. “Thank you to all the passionate and kind people I worked with.”
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis welcomed Brooks to to reply on Simulating the world It’s a somewhat vague — and ill-defined — phrase, but DeepMind has applied it to models like the recently released one The geniewhich can create playable and controllable virtual worlds from composite images, real photos, and even drawings.
Here’s how DeepMind researchers explain it in 2023 paper: “Applications of real-world simulation range from creating controllable content in games and movies to training embodied agents only in simulations that can be deployed directly in the real world.”
Brooks was one of the first to work on Sora, having started the project at OpenAI in January 2023. LinkedInBrooks claims to have led the project’s research direction and model training.
His departure comes as Sora, which has not yet been released, is said to be suffering from technical setbacks that leave it vulnerable to competing systems from Luma, Runway and others. per The original information system, unveiled in February, took more than 10 minutes of processing time to create a one-minute video. OpenAI is working on training an improved Sora machine that can quickly create clips, sources tell The Information.
Google has its own video creation model, Veo, which it unveiled this spring at its annual I/O developers conference, and which will soon be coming to YouTube Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video format, to let creators create six-second backgrounds and clips. .
Aside from the technology-related hurdles, OpenAI has appeared to cede a valuable partnership to video industry rivals in recent months. Earlier this month, Runway signed a deal with Lionsgate, the studio behind the “John Wick” franchise, to train a custom video model on Lionsgate’s film catalog. About a week later, Stability, which is developing its own set of video generation models, They were recruited James Cameron, director of “Avatar,” “Terminator” and “Titanic,” has joined its board of directors.
It was OpenAI He said We’ll be meeting with filmmakers and Hollywood studios earlier this year to showcase Sora – former CTO Mira Moratti civilized region It was – the company has cooperated with a number of Independent directors And some Brands To highlight the capabilities of the system.
However, OpenAI has yet to announce a long-term collaboration with a major production company.
Brooks – which he actually is, in a strange turn of events Return to Google, having once worked on the company’s Pixel phones — the latest in a series of high-profile resignations from OpenAI.
CTO Mira Murati, Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew, and Vice President of Research Barret Zoph announced their departures in late September. Leading research scientist Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI in February; Months later, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and former chief scientist, resigned, along with former safety chief Jan Laecke. In August, co-founder John Shulman said he was leaving OpenAI. Greg Brockman, the company’s president, is on leave.
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