OpenAI scientist Gabriel Petersson leaves to pursue founder mode.

According to Beating Monitor, Gabriel Petersson, a self-taught Swedish youth and former research scientist on OpenAI’s video generation model Sora team, has announced his departure from OpenAI. Petersson stated that he left OpenAI to pursue independent entrepreneurship, aiming to build his final product before the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and publicly declared the launch of FOUNDER MODE. Petersson’s personal journey is highly disruptive in the elite AI community. Born in a remote village so obscure it’s hard to find on maps, he dropped out of high school at age 17 and once considered himself unintelligent after failing to understand machine learning coursework. Yet he bypassed the traditional academic path from undergraduate to postdoctoral studies, rapidly mastering machine learning and front-end development through a top-down self-learning method centered on daily high-frequency questions posed to ChatGPT. During his job search, to avoid being filtered out due to his lack of formal credentials, Petersson adopted a demo-driven strategy that circumvented conventional recruitment processes. He independently developed high-performance web image grids and table components addressing key pain points in Midjourney and Dataland’s products, successfully impressing their founders and securing positions at both top-tier teams. By the end of 2024, at just 22 years old, Petersson joined OpenAI as a research scientist, contributing to core development of the Sora model. As OpenAI scaled back Sora’s further development in March 2026 due to computational costs and other factors, core creators and multiple researchers began departing throughout the spring. Petersson shifted within OpenAI earlier this year to form a new internal team, but after only a few months, he decided to fully exit the elite lab and re-enter the startup ecosystem as a founder.