Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles are leaving OpenAI, the company confirmed Friday. Weil led the company’s science research initiative, while Peebles was the researcher behind AI video tool Sora. A third departure was also confirmed: Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI’s chief technology officer of enterprise applications, told staff he was stepping down to spend more time with family.
The exits come as OpenAI pulls back from what leadership has called “side quests.” Sora was shut down last month after burning through an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs. The OpenAI for Science division, which ran a platform called Prism aimed at accelerating scientific discovery, is being folded into other research teams.
What Kevin Weil was doing at OpenAI
Weil had moved from his role as chief product officer to running the science research group. His team’s last act was releasing GPT-Rosalind, a model targeting life sciences and drug discovery, one day before his departure was announced.
His tenure was not without controversy. Weil deleted a post claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems after the mathematician behind erdosproblems.com publicly challenged the claim.
In his exit post, Weil wrote: “It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science. Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.”
Bill Peebles on Sora’s shutdown
Peebles, who built Sora, defended the project’s legacy despite its shutdown. He credited the video model with sparking broader industry investment in AI video generation.
“Sora ignited a huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” he wrote. He also made a broader point about research culture, arguing that exploratory work cannot share a roadmap with commercial priorities: “Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term.”
OpenAI tightens its focus
The three departures fit the same pattern. OpenAI is consolidating around enterprise AI and what it describes as a forthcoming “superapp,” and consumer-facing experiments are being wound down as a result.
Sora launched in 2024 to wide attention and was one of OpenAI’s most prominent bets beyond ChatGPT. At $1 million per day in compute costs, it became difficult to sustain as the company narrowed its priorities.
OpenAI for Science was announced formally in October 2025. Its shutdown came just months after. Weil and Peebles were two of the most visible faces of research work OpenAI was doing outside its core language models.
Their next moves have not been announced.