Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed ‘side quests’

OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s scientific research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind the AI ​​video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and its upcoming “superapp.”

The departure follows OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side missions“, including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million a day in computing costs, closed last month.

OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discoveries. It will be included in “other research teams,” Weil’s said social media message announce 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 results of our push for AGI.”

The team had a short and bumpy road after the formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming that GPT-5 resolved 10 previously unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, but that claim immediately fell apart when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com put it forward.

Weil’s departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalinda new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.

In one social media message In announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “tremendous amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research the video tool produced needed space outside the company’s main thrust.

“Cultivating entropy is the only way a research laboratory can thrive in the long term,” he wrote.

OpenAI also loses Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly broke the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with his family.

This article has been updated with the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.