Bill Peebles
Former head of Sora at OpenAI (left April 2026) · as of 2026-10-04 · source
Co-author of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) paper and the researcher who led OpenAI's Sora video models; left OpenAI in April 2026 after Sora was shut down.
Role changes
- 2026-04-17 Left OpenAI weeks after it announced Sora's shutdown, arguing that 'cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive' source
News mentioning Bill Peebles (2)
- Kevin Weil and Sora lead Bill Peebles leave OpenAI as it folds OpenAI for Science into other teams and sheds 'side quests' ★★
On April 17, 2026 Kevin Weil (former chief product officer, then head of OpenAI for Science) and Bill Peebles (head of Sora) announced they were leaving OpenAI, along with enterprise-applications CTO Srinivas Narayanan. OpenAI was folding the standalone science unit into other research teams and…
- OpenAI shuts down Sora: app and web closed April 26, API on Sept 24, 2026; Disney's $1B deal falls through ★★★
On March 24, 2026 OpenAI announced it was "saying goodbye" to Sora, its AI video app launched six months earlier with Sora 2. The web and app experiences closed on April 26, 2026 and the Sora API on Sept 24, 2026, with no direct replacement. Press reports cite heavy compute costs (about $1M a…
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