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

Source: TechCrunch

OpenAI leadership exits amid “side quests” cutbacks

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

The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer‑facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs TechCrunch, was shut down last month TechCrunch.

OpenAI for Science and the Prism platform

OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI‑powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery TechCrunch. According to Weil’s social‑media post Twitter/X, the team is being absorbed into “other research teams.”

“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 ten previously unsolved Erdős problems Futurism, but the claim fell apart 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 to accelerate life‑sciences research and drug discovery OpenAI blog.

Bill Peebles’ exit and reflections on research freedom

In a social‑media post Twitter/X, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced 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.

Additional leadership turnover

OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications, according to Wired. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally, citing a desire to spend more time with family.

This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.