OpenAI’s Star Sora Engineer Says He’s Starting a New Team

The star engineer who helped build OpenAI’s text-to-video model, Sora, says he’s starting a new team to chase artificial superintelligence.

Will DePue, one of Sora’s core contributors, wrote on X Wednesday that he’s returning to OpenAI after a long break to “start a new team” with Troy Luhman and Eric Luhman, both fellow Sora engineers.

The team is focused on an “incredibly high-risk bet that has a small, but significant, chance of leading to ASI,” DePue said.

“We’re keeping the team tight but we’re open to high-slope researchers & engineers interested in making progress in uncharted territory,” he added.

At press time, OpenAI had not released details about the team. The company did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Born in 2003, DePue studied computer science at the University of Michigan and wrote on his personal website that he has “dropped out” and is “on leave.”

DePue first joined OpenAI in July 2023, and his LinkedIn profile shows that he has since rejoined the company. At OpenAI, DePue trained ChatGPT models and developed Sora, according to his LinkedIn.

DePue also posted on his website about several personal projects he pursued — including a browser-based GPT implementation, a Turing-complete computer built inside Figma, and an embedding dataset project called the “Alexandria Index”.

Not much is publicly known about Troy Luhman and Eric Luhman, but the pair has published research papers in machine learning.

Depue, Troy Luhman, and Eric Luhman were part of the core team that developed Sora, which was unveiled in February last year. OpenAI publicly launched Sora in December, and Sora 2 was released in September.

OpenAI has made it known that reaching artificial general intelligence, the theoretical moment when AI can reason like humans, is a key goal.

While AGI remains the company’s mission, CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post in January that OpenAI is already looking beyond it to superintelligence, a theoretical advancement in which AI can reason far beyond human capability.

“Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity,” Altman wrote in January.