HomeKevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company sheds 'side quests'
OpenAI is losing two key figures behind its most ambitious projects. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI refocuses on enterprise AI and its upcoming "superapp."
The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to scale back "side quests," including customer-facing initiatives like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs, was shut down last month.
OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It is being absorbed into "other research teams," according to Weil’s social media post announcing the news.
"It's been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science," Weil wrote. "Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI."
The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, but that claim unraveled quickly when the mathematician who runs erdosproblems.com called it out.
Weil's departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model designed to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.
In a social media post announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with sparking a "huge amount of investment in video across the industry," and argued that the kind of research behind the video tool requires space away from the company's mainline roadmap.
"Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term," he wrote.
OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, according to Wired. Narayanan reportedly announced internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.
This article has been updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.
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OpenAI is losing two key figures behind its most ambitious projects. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s science research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI refocuses on enterprise AI and its upcoming "superapp."
The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to scale back "side quests," including customer-facing initiatives like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs, was shut down last month.
OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It is being absorbed into "other research teams," according to Weil’s social media post announcing the news.
"It's been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science," Weil wrote. "Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI."
The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, but that claim unraveled quickly when the mathematician who runs erdosproblems.com called it out.
Weil's departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model designed to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.
In a social media post announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with sparking a "huge amount of investment in video across the industry," and argued that the kind of research behind the video tool requires space away from the company's mainline roadmap.
"Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term," he wrote.
OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, according to Wired. Narayanan reportedly announced internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.
This article has been updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.
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