3 OpenAI executives are leaving as the company shuts down side projects
Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan are all leaving as OpenAI folds their teams into core operations
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Three OpenAI executives announced their departures on Friday as the company continues to shut down side projects and consolidate around its core products ahead of a possible IPO.
Separate posts on X $TWTR carried announcements from Kevin Weil, OpenAI for Science's vice president, and Bill Peebles, the researcher who oversaw the now-shuttered Sora video app. Srinivas Narayanan, CTO of B2B Applications at OpenAI, also announced his exit, according to TechCrunch.
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In a statement, an OpenAI spokesperson described the move as an effort to fold OpenAI for Science's work directly into the groups responsible for model development, product, and infrastructure. According to Bloomberg, Prism — the AI-powered scientific research tool that Weil's team developed — will become part of OpenAI's Codex team.
Before landing at OpenAI in 2024, Weil had been a senior executive at both Meta $META and Twitter. He came aboard as chief product officer and later founded OpenAI for Science, an initiative designed to use AI as a tool for speeding up scientific research. "It's been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science," he wrote on Friday.
Arriving at OpenAI in 2023, Peebles was a driving force behind Sora's debut, which briefly pushed the app to the top of Apple $AAPL's App Store charts; the platform was pulled last month as the company sought to cut costs and redirect computing resources. TechCrunch reported that Sora had been burning through roughly $1 million daily in computing expenses. Writing on social media, Peebles said Sora had set off a wave of investment in AI video across the broader industry, and contended that producing that kind of research demands insulation from a company's core product priorities.
The churn follows several other recent shake-ups: Brad Lightcap shifted out of the COO seat into a loosely defined "special projects" portfolio, Fidji Simo stepped back from her role overseeing product and business on medical leave for a neuroimmune condition, and Kate Rouch departed the marketing chief position while undergoing cancer treatment.
OpenAI is now focusing more on products for businesses and coding tools. It has ended standalone consumer projects like Sora and is working on a single app that combines ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and other features. The company reported $13.1 billion in revenue for 2025 and recently closed what it called the largest funding round in Silicon Valley history, with a valuation of $852 billion.