Asia Tech Wire (Feb 19) -- A Chinese researcher from New York University has denied being one of the inventors of Sora.

As the discussion of Sora, the large video model launched by OpenAI, continues to heat up, news has recently emerged that one of the inventors of Sora is Saining Xie, a genius graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Xie publicly denied the rumour on Monday, saying he has nothing to do with Sora.

The researcher added, "For a complex system like Sora, talent comes first, data second, computing power third, and nothing else is irreplaceable."

"While asking why Sora hasn't appeared in China, one might also have to ask whether we're ready for it, assuming it does appear (which could be soon)," Xie said.

Xie is currently an assistant professor of computer science at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and before that he was a research scientist at Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR).

Notably, OpenAI lists 13 authors for Sora on its website, led by Tim Brooks and William (Bill) Peebles, without Xie.

Before Bill graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and joined OpenAI last May, he interned at Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. for eight months, during which time he crossed paths with Xie.

During the internship, Bill and Xie collaborated on the publication of the DiT model, which for the first time combined the Transformer with diffusion models.

And OpenAI's public technical report on Sora also mentions Bill and Xie's work on this project.