**OpenAI Star Engineer Will DePue Returns to Lead New Team Aiming for Artificial Superintelligence**
Will DePue, one of the core contributors behind OpenAI’s text-to-video model, Sora, announced on X this Wednesday that he is returning to OpenAI after a long break to start a new team. The newly formed group also includes fellow Sora engineers Troy Luhman and Eric Luhman. Their mission is an “incredibly high-risk bet” with a small but significant chance of achieving artificial superintelligence (ASI), DePue shared.
“We’re keeping the team tight but we’re open to high-slope researchers & engineers interested in making progress in uncharted territory,” he added. As of now, OpenAI has not released additional details about this new team, and the company did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
### Background on Will DePue
Born in 2003, DePue studied computer science at the University of Michigan. According to his personal website, he has “dropped out” and is currently “on leave.” DePue first joined OpenAI in July 2023, and his LinkedIn profile indicates that he has now rejoined the company. During his time at OpenAI, he contributed to training ChatGPT models and played a pivotal role in developing Sora.
Beyond his work at OpenAI, DePue has pursued several personal projects, such as a browser-based GPT implementation, a Turing-complete computer built inside Figma, and an embedding dataset project called the “Alexandria Index.”
### About Troy and Eric Luhman
While not much is publicly known about Troy and Eric Luhman, both have published research papers in machine learning. The trio—DePue, Troy, and Eric Luhman—formed the core team behind Sora, which OpenAI unveiled in February last year. Sora was publicly launched in December 2023, followed by the release of Sora 2 in September 2024.
### OpenAI’s Vision: From AGI to Superintelligence
OpenAI has long emphasized the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), the theoretical milestone when AI can reason and understand like humans. While AGI remains the company’s central mission, CEO Sam Altman signaled in a January blog post that OpenAI is already looking beyond this goal.
He described superintelligence as a future stage where AI systems would reason far beyond human capability. Altman wrote, “Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and in turn massively increase abundance and prosperity.”
As DePue and his team embark on this bold new venture at OpenAI, the AI community will be watching closely for developments on the path toward superintelligence.
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https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-sora-engineer-will-depue-new-team-artificial-superintelligence-2025-10