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

OpenAI has lost two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshots. Kevin Weil, who leads 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 its business AI environment and its upcoming “superapp.”

The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut “side quests“including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which lost a approximately $1 million per day to compute cost, is closed last month.

OpenAI for Science is the internal research group behind it Prisman AI-powered platform that promises to accelerate scientific discovery. It was absorbed by “other research groups,” according to Weil’s post on social media 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. “The acceleration of science will be one of the most strikingly positive outcomes of our push into AGI.”

The team had a short and bumpy road after its formal announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet saying that GPT-5 has solved 10 unresolved Erdős math problems, but that claim was quickly dropped when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out.

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

In a post on social media 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 that makes video tools needed space from the company’s mainline roadmap.

“Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive in the long term,” he wrote.

OpenAI also lost Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of business applications, Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly broke the news internally that he will be leaving to spend more time with family.

This article has been updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.