Tim Brooks, a research scientist at OpenAI where he co-led its video generation model Sora, left the company to join Google DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research division.
“I will be joining @GoogleDeepMind to work on video generation and world simulators! Can't wait to collaborate with such a talented team. I had an amazing two years at OpenAI making Sora. Thank you to all the passionate and kind people I worked with. Excited for the next chapter!” he said on X.
The exit comes at a time when OpenAI secured $6.6bn from investors including Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Microsoft and NVIDIA, elevating its valuation to $157bn.
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Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis welcomed Brooks to the team saying, “Thrilled to welcome @_tim_brooks to @GoogleDeepMind. So excited to be working together to make the long-standing dream of a world simulator a reality!!”
In one of its papers published last year, Google DeepMind explains the concept of world simulator. “Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world,” it says.
Brooks research at Sora explored the large-scale generative models that simulate the physical world. He was one of the earliest researchers to work on Sora in January 2023.
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He received a PhD at Berkeley AI Research where he invented InstructPix2Pix which generates images based on text prompts. His previous work includes AI that powers Pixel phone's camera at Google and video generation models at NVIDIA.
Sora's Multiple Competitors
Sora, teased in February this year, is yet to be launched. According to a report by The Information, OpenAI is training a new version of Sora which is hoped to generate high-quality, longer videos. The original version took more than 10 minutes of processing time to make a 1-minute video clip.
Meanwhile, its rival Runway signed a deal with Lionsgate, the studio behind the “John Wick” franchise, to train a custom video model on Lionsgate’s movie catalog, as reported by TechCrunch. Another rival Stability AI, which is developing its own set of video generation models, recruited Avatar, Terminator and Titanic director James Cameron to its board, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
However, OpenAI has reached out to filmmakers, Hollywood studios and brands to showcase Sora's capabilities. The 2024 Tribeca Festival and OpenAI announced a programme to debut five original short films made using Sora.
Series of Exits Following Controversy Surrounding OpenAI
Brooks departure from Sam Altman’s OpenAI comes at a time when there have been multiple exits only recently. Chief technology officer Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew and research VP Barret Zoph resigned in late September. Research scientist Andrej Karpathy left the company early this year. OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman also quit, along with ex-safety leader Jan Leike.
The controversy around OpenAI and Sam Altman have been brewing since a long time. OpenAI has been accused of prioritising product development over safety. In November 2023, Altman was removed from the company as the board found he had not been “consistently candid” with them. However, he was reappointed in March.
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After resigning from the company, Jan Leike, explaining his decision on X, said “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
When OpenAI demoed its latest model,GPT-4o, which responds to speech in real-time in a human-like voice, Scarlett Johansson accused the company of using her voice without her consent. She said in a statement, "When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference."
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