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these days, openai is a good example of what it means to be a blessing and a curse. on the one hand, the company's top management has been in turmoil, with important members leaving one after another; on the other hand, it has successfully won the favor of investors and raised a huge sum of us$6.6 billion based on a valuation of us$157 billion.

the same is true today. shortly after openai released canvas, it lost another general: sora team leader tim brooks ran away and joined competitor google deepmind.

after the news was announced, deepmind co-founder demis hassabis came out to greet him immediately and said he was looking forward to working with him "turn the long-awaited dream of creating a world simulator into a reality」。

google chief scientist jeff dean also immediately expressed his welcome. of course, enjoy, like, congratulate and make fun of OpenAI there are also many comments.

some people also expressed concerns about the sora project, which seems to have been in trouble: brother, why did you leave before sora was released?

who is tim brooks?

tim brooks is one of the research directors of the openai sora project, the other director is bill peebles. both of them are the "fathers of sora", and both of them are very young - both have just graduated with ph.d.s in 2023.

dr. tim brooks graduated from uc berkeley's "berkeley artificial intelligence institute" bair, where his mentor was alyosha efros, who was educated in the same school as william (bill) peebles, another director of sora.

during his phd studies, he proposed instructpix2pix. he also provided ai algorithms for pixel mobile cameras at google andnvidiaworked on video generation models.

in 2023, tim brooks successfully graduated with a doctoral thesis of nearly 100 pages. the title of the paper is "generative models for image and long video synthesis". for more introduction, please refer to machine heart’s previous report, “people just graduated, subverting the entire ai industry: a look at sora’s two leaders’ ph.d. thesis.”

after graduating from his ph.d., tim brooks joined openai and participated in many studies such as gpt-4. in january 2023, he co-launched the sora project with peebles - he was also the first author of the sora technical report.

why did he leave?

netizens speculated that brooks' departure was not only inspired by the recent wave of high-level resignations at openai, but also had something to do with sora's difficult childbirth.

the information has reported that sora has serious technical problems, making it difficult to compete with competitors such as luma, stability and runway, not to mention pika, which has been in the limelight recently. according to the media, the original sora system in february required 10 minutes of processing time to produce a 1-minute video clip. in the past few months, improving the speed of video generation has been one of the priorities of the sora team. even so, so far, we still haven't seen any signs that sora will be released.

at the same time, sora's competitors are not only increasing in number, but also becoming stronger, seizing markets that sora has not yet entered.

for example, last month, runway established a partnership with lionsgate pictures to train a customized video model based on lionsgate movies; stability even won the famous director james cameron to join. in addition, many companies in china are vigorously entering the field of ai video generation.

tim brooks' next stop google naturally has its own video generation model veo, and it will soon be integrated into the youtube short film application. this should be where tim brooks shines.

demis hassabis announces veo at google i/o 2024

openai continues to lose senior management

up to now, openai has almost lost all its founding members, and more elite talents are leaving, including:

• tim brooks, principal, sora

• mira murati, chief technology officercto

• bob mcgrew, chief research officer

• barret zoph, vice president of research

• andrej karpathy, renowned research scientist

• ilya sutskever, co-founder, chief scientist

• jan leike, head of security

• john schulman, co-founder

as for openai president greg brockman, who is on vacation, it is said that he is about to leave his job.

this makes us ask: when will the turbulent top management of openai stabilize?

reference links:

https://x.com/_tim_brooks/status/1841982327431561528

https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/03/a-co-lead-on-sora-openais-video-generator-has-left-for-google/

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-is-revamping-sora-ai-video?rc=d4lanv