Gabriel dropped out of high school and became a self-taught OpenAI scientist; he then left the company to start founder mode.

According to Beating, Gabriel Petersson, a self-taught Swedish youth and former research scientist on OpenAI's Sora video generation model team, has announced his departure from OpenAI. Petersson stated that he left OpenAI to start his own business, planning to create one last product before the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and has boldly announced the start of Founder Mode. Petersson's personal growth path is highly disruptive in the elite-dominated AI world. Born in a remote village in Sweden, difficult to find on a map, he dropped out of high school at 17 and even considered himself stupid because he couldn't understand machine learning courses. However, he abandoned the traditional undergraduate-to-postdoctoral learning chain, quickly mastering machine learning and front-end engineering development through a top-down self-learning method of frequently asking questions on ChatGPT daily. During his job search, to avoid his resume being rejected due to a lack of formal education, Petersson adopted a demo-driven strategy that bypassed the hiring process. Addressing the pain points of Midjourney and Dataland's products, he independently developed high-performance web image grids and table components, successfully impressing the founders and joining both top teams. In late 2024, at just 22 years old, Peterson successfully joined OpenAI as a research scientist, participating in the core development of the Sora model. However, with OpenAI halting further development of Sora in March 2026 due to considerations such as computational costs, the core founders and several researchers left in the spring. At the beginning of this year, Peterson moved from Sora to build a new team within OpenAI, but only a few months later decided to completely leave the top lab and re-enter the startup ecosystem as a founder.