After Sora shut down, its former head teamed up with DreamWorks' founder to start anew in AI video.

动察 Beating AI News Flash: The Information, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is launching an AI video company with former OpenAI Sora head Bill Peebles and former Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa. The new company will train its own video models, targeting filmmakers directly, and is currently in talks with investors including a16z for financing. The company name and funding size have not been disclosed.

Peebles was the core technical lead for Sora and one of the authors of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) paper. He left OpenAI shortly after the company shut down the Sora consumer app and API this year. At the time of his departure, he publicly stated that this kind of exploratory research needs room away from the company's main product roadmap.

Katzenberg has already bet on AI video this year. In May, his WndrCo participated in a $59 million funding round for real-time AI video company Reactor. This time he is going a step further from investor to directly forming a company with the former Sora head and training models himself.

This is also Katzenberg's most aggressive video venture since Quibi. Quibi raised $1.75 billion and shut down soon after launching in 2020. Six years later, he is back in video, only this time swapping a short-form video platform for AI models built for filmmakers.