Decrypting Sora's 13-member team: 3 Chinese, including Peking University alumni, with a recent PhD and a 21-year-old genius

Author: Xinzhi Yuan

OpenAI shocked the world with Sora.

What kind of genius team could develop such a monumental work?

It turns out that OpenAI's author team consists of only 13 people, led by a recent PhD graduate, with members born in the 2000s, including 3 Chinese individuals and an alumnus from Peking University.

Tim Brooks

Tim Brooks co-led the Sora project at OpenAI, focusing his research on developing large generative models that can simulate the real world.

He earned his PhD at the Berkeley AI Research Center, with his doctoral advisor being Alyosha Efros. During his PhD, he proposed a technique called InstructPix2Pix.

Before joining OpenAI, he worked at Google, contributing to the AI technology for the Pixel phone camera, and also researched video generation models at NVIDIA.

At the same time, he was also a key researcher for DALL·E 3.

Another part of his resume is truly impressive------

His photography has won awards from "National Geographic," "Nature's Best Photography," and the "National Wildlife Federation."

His animal photographs:

He has also performed at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway in New York City and won awards in international a cappella competitions.

Netizens have expressed their envy for his freedom.

Finally, Tim Brooks somewhat "Versailles" in his resume stated: "I am passionate about AI, and fortunately, this passion perfectly blends with my love for photography, film, and music."

It seems that actors who do not like photography cannot become scientists at OpenAI.

Bill Peebles

Another scientist co-leading the Sora project, Bill Peebles, focuses on the development of video generation and world simulation technologies.

His resume is similar to Tim Brooks', having also completed his PhD at the Berkeley AI Research Center under Alyosha Efros.

He completed his undergraduate studies at MIT, with Antonio Torralba as his advisor.

He has also interned at FAIR, Adobe Research, and NVIDIA.

During his internship at FAIR, he co-authored the paper "Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers" with current NYU Chinese professor Xie Sainin, which proposed the foundational architecture for Sora.

After graduating from Berkeley, he joined OpenAI and led the team to work almost non-stop for over a year before Sora was released.

Connor Holmes

After interning at Microsoft for a few years, Connor Holmes became a full-time employee there, and then switched to OpenAI at the end of last year, where he encountered a major project like Sora.

He has been dedicated to solving system efficiency issues encountered during reasoning and training deep learning tasks.

He has extensive experience in areas such as LLM, BERT-style encoders, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and UNets.

Similarly, he has noted his hobbies on LinkedIn—swimming, and he has even worked part-time as a lifeguard.

He attended the Colorado School of Mines for both his undergraduate and graduate studies.

Although the school is not highly ranked, he still became a researcher at OpenAI due to his outstanding abilities, participating in projects like Sora and DALL·E 3.

Will DePue

One cannot help but marvel that perhaps only in a place like OpenAI can researchers born in the 2000s take on significant responsibilities and play key roles in such important projects.

Looking at his resume, it seems astonishing that he could join OpenAI as a researcher right after graduating from undergraduate studies.

However, discovering that he founded a company while still in high school only reinforces the notion that talent knows no age.

About six months ago, he shared on a YouTube program how he achieved so many remarkable accomplishments at such a young age.

Yufei Guo

This Chinese researcher is very mysterious; although he has not left a resume, he is named in OpenAI's two recent major projects.

GPT-4 Technical Report:

DALL·E 3 Technical Report:

Li Jing

Li Jing graduated from Peking University for his undergraduate studies and then obtained a PhD in physics from MIT.

He is now engaged in research at OpenAI, focusing on multimodal learning and generative models, and has participated in the development of DALL·E 3.

DALL·E 3 Technical Report

Prior to this, he conducted postdoctoral research at FAIR in collaboration with Yann LeCun.

David Schnurr

This individual is a veteran in the AI field; he joined Graphiq in 2012, which was later acquired by Amazon, leading a team that created the prototype for what is now Alexa.

In 2016, he switched to Uber, and three years later, he joined OpenAI, where he has worked ever since.

He is also one of the few individuals who could join OpenAI with just an undergraduate degree.

Joe Taylor

Joe Taylor's previous work experience includes Stripe, Periscope.tv/Twitter, Square, and his own design studio, Joe Taylor Designer.

From 2004 to 2010, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in New Media/Computer Art at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Based on his education and work background, he seems more like an artist than an engineer.

He possesses strong professional skills in various areas, including user interface design, web design, and art direction.

Before joining the Sora team, he worked on the ChatGPT team.

Eric Luhman

Eric Luhman is a passionate research enthusiast in artificial intelligence, focusing on developing efficient and cutting-edge AI algorithms.

His research interests mainly lie in generative modeling and computer vision, particularly in diffusion models.

Many of his papers are related to diffusion models and other visual models.

Troy Luhman

This researcher, whose name is very similar to Eric Luhman, has almost no information available online. The only mention is a retweet related to the controversy surrounding Sam Altman's departure.

Clarence Wing Yin NG

This author is even more mysterious, with almost no relevant information found online.

There is only a patent record in the U.S. patent information that seems related to his previous work at Amazon.

Ricky Wang

This Chinese engineer has worked at Meta for many years and graduated from UC Berkeley.

He joined OpenAI in January of this year.

He graduated from UC Berkeley:

Aditya Ramesht

He is a veteran at OpenAI, having previously led DALL·E 2 and DALL·E 3.

This prominent figure, who leads the Sora team today, only holds an undergraduate degree.

Aditya completed his undergraduate studies at New York University and participated in some projects at the LeCun lab. He was directly retained by OpenAI after graduation.

This is a team led by young individuals, focusing on output rather than background, that has once again shocked the world since OpenAI's inception in 2014!