Who is Will DePue, College Dropout, Who Helped Build OpenAI’s Sora?

Since its official introduction in February 2024, OpenAI’s Sora has been making waves in the generative AI industry. Who would have thought that a 20-year-old, college dropout, would be one of the major contributors to developing this advanced text-to-video model?

OpenAI has a plethora of young talent within its ranks and Will DePue is one of them. DePue, who was pursuing a BS in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, dropped out of college, in 2022. After working at Commsor and InternetActivism, he joined OpenAI in July 2023 as a “Resident Member of Technical Staff.” 

At first, DePue worked on Applied Research projects. Jailbreak and prompt injection mitigations, custom models, model capability evaluations, API finetuning, and more. After just seven months, he transitioned to the Sora team, where he worked on OpenAI’s first text-to-video model.

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DePue has reportedly joined 1X Technologies, a humanoid robotics company. The company is funded by top players like NVIDIA, OpenAI, TigerGlobal, and everOn. 

Joining OpenAI

In a podcast with Omar Waseem, DePue said that he joined OpenAI by DMing his friends who had any connections with the company. He said, “I dropped out of college and built startups, and been doing random projects since then.” 

DePue mentioned that he wanted to get into OpenAI and learn. It didn’t matter to him, which position he started in as long as he could earn and contribute to the team.

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We have embedded the podcast video below. You can watch it here. 

Early Life and Projects

Will DePue was born in Seattle and was homeschooled till the sixth grade. DePue was an Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts of America. He attended Geffen Academy at UCLA at studied BS in computer science at the University of Michigan but dropped out. Before joining OpenAI, he founded a few startups.

DePue started coding at the age of 17 and became interested in AI after a friend’s dad built a chat app with GPT-3.

He is the Founder and CEO of DeepResearch, a community analytics company, in 2021 which he built during his senior year of high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. During this time, he recruited a remote-only team and saved and analyzed over 100,000,000 community data points before the company was acquired by Commsor, Inc. 

He then worked as a Software Engineer at Commsor from 2022 to 2023, contributing to the development of chat-based community analytics tools. Following this, he served as an Engineering Lead at InternetActivism, leading the development of digital solutions for real-world problems. 

Subsequently, he co-founded Thrive.fyi and served as its CEO, creating a Discord platform tailored for high school communication needs. 

In July 2023, DePue joined OpenAI as a Member of Technical Staff (Resident), where he worked on Applied Research projects until January 2024, focusing on jailbreak and prompt injection mitigations, custom models, and API fine-tuning. Currently, he continues his tenure at OpenAI as a Member of Technical Staff, contributing to the development of Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model. Currently, he is working on a one-month-long hackathon called ‘10% project.’

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What the Future Holds

Will DePue believes in exploring different options at a young age and suggests people get into coding and work on something they love. 

A few days ago, DePue proposed a 2-month study on artificial intelligence during the summer of 2024 at Stable Cafe in the Mission District of San Francisco. 

A team of 10 carefully selected scientists will explore the hypothesis that all aspects of learning and intelligence can be precisely described and simulated by machines. The aim is to develop methods for machines to use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve human-specific problems, and improve autonomously.

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