I’ve decided to leave OpenAI. Below is the note I shared with my team. Building Sora zero-to-one with you all has been the honor and adventure of a lifetime. As this team knows well, one of the best parts of working on video is that you can see the scaling behavior with your own eyes, and there have been a lot of oh-shit moments over the years. About a month into Sora, way back when this was just a tiny two-man effort, we saw a sample where a land shark swam by a bunch of intricate cacti in a desert (it was a weird prompt), and the details of each cactus were perfectly preserved once the shark passed. We had never seen object permanence like this in any video model. That’s when we knew we were onto something. It’s amazing how much the Overton window has shifted on video models. OpenAI has a high tolerance for crazy moonshots, but even back in July 2023 there was a ton of skepticism that high-fidelity 1080p multi-shot generation was achievable within a year given the state of video in the broader industry. We managed to get there 7 months later. While the original Sora ignited a huge amount of investment in video across the industry, it took the next generation of models with Sora 2 for the broader public to understand the transformation happening. I’m proud of all the sleepless nights before and after the launch this team endured in order to deploy the technology in a responsible way and help steer societal norms. I am immensely grateful to Sam, Mark, Aditya and Jakub for fostering a research environment that allowed us to pursue ideas off-the-beaten path from the company’s mainline roadmap. It’s tempting in life to mode collapse to the most important thing, but cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term, and Sam deeply understands this. Sora was a project that could not have happened anywhere but OpenAI, and I will always deeply love this place for that. I’m going to miss this team a lot, but there are great things on the horizon for all of you. I will always be in your guys’ corner cheering you on. Love, Bill

amazing work by @gabeeegoooh and team!

sora x disney is going to be pure magic. dream come true to be working with them.

we’re setting usage limits for free users to 6 gens/day. chatgpt plus and pro users have unchanged limits, and everybody can purchase additional gens as needed. our gpus are melting, and we want to let as many people access sora as possible!

we’ve made some improvements to sora 2. you should see much less “flickering” now, among other changes. rolling out now!