OpenAI is losing two of its most ambitious lunar architects. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s scientific research initiative, and Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around business AI and its own upcoming ‘superapp.”
The departures follow OpenAI’s decision to cut its “side questsincluding client-facing bets such as Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora, which was losing about $1 million a day in computing costs, shut down last month.
OpenAI for Science was the in-house research team behind Prism, an artificial intelligence platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It is absorbed into “other research groups,” according to Weil’s post on social media announcing the news.
“It’s been a mind-bending 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 striking positive outcomes of our AGI push.”
The team had a short and bumpy road after its official announcement in October 2025. Weil deleted a tweet that claimed GPT-5 had solved 10 previously unsolved Erdős math problems, but that claim immediately fell apart 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 for accelerating life sciences research and drug discovery.
In one post on social media in announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with sparking a “tremendous amount of investment in video across the industry” and argued that the kind of research the video tool produced required space away from the company’s main roadmap.
“Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive in the long run,” he wrote.
OpenAI is also losing 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 family.
This article has been updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.
