OpenAI loses key leaders as it trims science and consumer side bets
OpenAI’s leadership shake-up continues
OpenAI is losing two of the people most closely associated with some of its highest-profile experimental projects as the company narrows its focus on core AI development.
Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind the video generation tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI continues to shed what it has described internally as “side quests,” including customer-facing efforts like Sora and OpenAI for Science.
Sora, which was reportedly burning an estimated $1 million a day in compute costs, was shut down last month. Peebles said in a social media post that Sora helped spark a wave of investment in video across the industry, but argued that work like that needs room outside the company’s main product roadmap.
“Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term,” he wrote.
Weil’s departure follows OpenAI’s decision to fold OpenAI for Science into other research teams. The initiative had been behind Prism, an AI-powered platform designed to accelerate scientific discovery. In announcing his exit, Weil said the past two years had been “mind-expanding,” and added that accelerating science would be one of the most positive outcomes of the push toward AGI.
The science team’s road was brief and rocky. After its formal unveiling in October 2025, Weil deleted a post claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, a claim that was quickly challenged by the mathematician who runs erdosproblems.com.
Weil’s departure came just a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a model aimed at life sciences research and drug discovery.
OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, according to Wired. Narayanan reportedly told colleagues internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.
The departures underscore a broader strategic shift at OpenAI as it consolidates around enterprise AI and its forthcoming “superapp,” while stepping back from some of the more ambitious consumer and science-focused experiments that helped define its recent expansion.
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