A co-lead on Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, has left for Google

Brooks was one of the first to work on Sora, having kickstarted the project at OpenAI in January 2023. On his LinkedIn, Brooks claims to have spearheaded the project’s research direction and model training.

His departure comes as Sora, which has yet to be released, reportedly suffers from technical setbacks that position it poorly against rival systems from Luma, Runway, and others. Per The Information, the original system, revealed in February, took more than 10 minutes of processing time to make a 1-minute video clip. OpenAI is in the process of training an improved Sora that could quickly make clips, sources tell The Information.

Google has its own video generation model, Veo, that it unveiled this spring at its annual I/O developer conference, and which will soon come to YouTube Shorts, YouTube’s short-form video format, to let creators generate backgrounds and six-second clips.

Aside from tech-related hurdles, OpenAI has appeared to cede vaulable 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 a custom video model on Lionsgate’s movie catalog. Roughly a week later, Stability, which is developing its own set of video generation models, recruited “Avatar,” “Terminator” and “Titanic” director James Cameron to its board.

OpenAI was said to be meeting with filmmakers and Hollywood studios earlier this year to demo Sora — ex-CTO Mira Murati attended Cannes — and the company has teamed up with a number of independent directors and some brands to showcase the system’s capabilities.

However, OpenAI has yet to announce a long-term collaboration with a major production house.

Brooks is the latest in a string of high-profile resignations from OpenAI.

CTO Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and research VP Barret Zoph announced their resignations in late September. Prominent research scientist Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI in February; months later, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever quit, along with ex-safety leader Jan Leike. In August, co-founder John Schulman said he would leave OpenAI. And Greg Brockman, the company’s president, is on sabbatical.