Bill Peebles announced that he has decided to leave OpenAI, sharing the note he gave his team. He described building Sora "zero-to-one" as "the honor and adventure of a lifetime," recalling the early days as a "tiny two-man effort" when an unexpected sample — a land shark swimming past intricate cacti with each one perfectly preserved — convinced the team they had achieved object permanence and were "onto something."
Peebles, who co-invented diffusion transformers during his PhD, joined OpenAI in 2023 to lead Sora and credited Sam Altman, Mark, Aditya, and Jakub for fostering a research environment that allowed the project to pursue ideas off the company's mainline roadmap. He did not name his next move.