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financial news agency, october 4 (editor zhou ziyi)openai’s personnel turmoil continues. tim brooks, one of the co-leads of the company’s video generator sora, recently announced that he has switched to google.

brooks worked on sora with william peebles. in his linkedin profile, brooks claims he spearheaded the project's research direction and large-scale model training.

he announced on friday (october 4) on the social platform brooks also wrote, "my two years at openai developing sora have been great."

google deepmind ceo demis hassabis responded to brooks on x, saying he would help "realize the long-term dream of a world simulator."

world simulator is a rather vaguely defined phrase that deepmind has currently applied to models such as the recently released genie, which can generate playable, motion-controllable virtual worlds from synthetic images, real photos, and even sketches.

as explained in a 2023 deepmind paper, “the applications of real-world simulators range from controlled content creation in games and movies, to purely training physical agents in simulations that can be directly deployed in the real world. "

sora is in trouble

some netizens commented that the person in charge left before sora was released? brooks was one of the first researchers to work on sora, helping launch the project at openai in january 2023.

according to previous reports, the yet-to-be-released sora has suffered technical setbacks and has a small market compared to competitors such as luma and runway.

the original system announced in february reportedly took more than 10 minutes to process a 1-minute video clip. currently, openai is training an improved sora that can quickly produce clips.

technical hurdles aside, openai appears to have ceded some valuable partnership opportunities to competitors in the video generation space in recent months.

for example, early last month runway signed an agreement with lionsgate pictures, the producer of the "john wick" series, to train a custom video model on lionsgate's film catalog; in addition, stability ai has recruited well-known directors james cameron joins the board of directors.

as for google, the company unveiled its own video generation model, veo, at its annual i/o developer conference this spring, which will soon appear on youtube's short video format youtube shorts, letting creators generate background clips and 6 seconds of video footage.

in contrast, however, openai has yet to announce a long-term partnership with a major production company.

it is worth mentioning that brooks is the latest in a series of high-profile resignations of openai executives.

well-known research scientist andrej karpathy left openai in february this year; a few months later, openai co-founder and former chief scientist ilya sutskever and former security chief jan leike resigned; in august this year, the company's co-founder john schulman also called will leave openai; at the end of september, chief technology officer mira murati, chief research officer bob mcgrew and vice president of research barret zoph announced their departures one after another; and the company's other co-founder and company president greg brockman is currently on leave.