OpenAI is losing two of the architects of its most ambitious moonshot. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s scientific research initiatives, and Bill Peebles, a researcher at AI video tool Sora, both announced their resignations on Friday. The exit comes as OpenAI integrates enterprise AI with upcoming “super apps.”
The departure follows OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including customer-facing bets like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing about $1 million a day in computing costs, shut down last month.
OpenAI for Science is the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-based platform to accelerate scientific discovery. The company is being absorbed into “another research team,” according to Weil’s social media post announcing the news.
“It’s been a mind-expanding two years, going from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and launching OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Acceleration of science will be one of the most incredibly positive outcomes of the AGI drive.”
The team has had a short and bumpy road since its official announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet claiming GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdös math problems, but the claim was immediately quashed when a mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com mentioned it.
Weil’s departure comes just one day after his team launched GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life science research and drug discovery.
In a social media post announcing his resignation, Peebles credited Sora with sparking “massive investment in video across the industry” and argued that the kind of research that creates video tools needs space outside the company’s mainline roadmap.
“Cultivating entropy is the only way a laboratory can prosper in the long term,” he wrote.
OpenAI also lost its chief technology officer for enterprise applications, Srinivas Narayanan, Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced internally that he was leaving to spend more time with his family.
This article has been updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan..
