After Sora was shut down, its former project lead teamed up with the founder of DreamWorks to launch a new venture focused on AI video.

Beating AI News reports, citing The Information and sources familiar with the matter, that DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg is launching an AI video company with former OpenAI Sora lead Bill Peebles and ex-Dropbox CFO Sujay Jaswa. The startup will train its own video models to target filmmakers directly, and is currently in talks with investors including a16z for funding. The company’s name and funding size have not been disclosed. Peebles served as Sora’s core technical lead and is one of the authors of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) paper. He left OpenAI shortly after the company shut down Sora’s consumer app and API this year, publicly stating at the time that exploratory research of this type needs space to operate outside a company’s core product roadmap. Katzenberg has already made an AI video bet this year: in May, his firm WndrCo participated in a $59 million funding round for real-time AI video startup Reactor. This time, he is going beyond investor status to co-found a company with the former Sora lead to build its own models. This marks Katzenberg’s most ambitious video venture since Quibi. The short-form video platform raised $1.75 billion but folded shortly after launching in 2020. Six years later, he is returning to the video space, though this time shifting from a short-form platform to developing AI models for filmmakers.