Core member of OpenAI's "Her" project, Connor, resigns to start his own business

Alexis Conneau, one of the key figures behind OpenAI GPT-4o's real-time audio technology and former leader of the OpenAI "Her" project, has announced his departure to start his own venture. This news has sparked widespread attention in the AI community.

During his tenure at OpenAI, Conneau made significant contributions to the real-time voice interaction feature of GPT-4o. He revealed on social media that he was involved in the development of GPT-5. His departure comes less than two months after the official launch of the ChatGPT "Her" mode.

From Academic Research to Industrial Practice

With a strong academic background, Conneau obtained a degree in mathematics from the Paris Institute of Technology before being drawn to the AI wave and diving into computer science research. During his tenure at Meta and Google, he participated in several important AI projects, including XLM-RoBERTa, XLS-R, and Wav2vec-U, accumulating rich experience in the field of speech technology.

In 2023, Conneau joined OpenAI and quickly became a key figure in the "Her" project. He created and led the initial version of OpenAI's "Her" from scratch, laying the foundation for the voice interaction feature of GPT-4o.

High Expectations for the Entrepreneurial Project

Although Conneau has not disclosed the specific entrepreneurial project, the phrase "creating magic" is enough to ignite the imagination of industry insiders. Considering his deep expertise in speech technology and large-scale language models, it is widely speculated that his new company may make breakthroughs in the fields of AI chatbots, voice assistants, or multimodal AI.