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

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

6:01 AM IST · April 18, 2026

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 AI video tool Sora, both announced their departures on Friday. The exits come as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and itsforthcoming “superapp.” 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 anestimated $1 million per dayin compute costs, wasshut down last month. OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behindPrism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery. It’s being absorbed into “other research teams,” according to Weil’ssocial media postannouncing 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. “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 hadsolved 10 previously unsolved Erdősmathematical problems, but that claim fell apart immediately when the mathematician who runs the website erdosproblems.com called it out. Weil’s departure comes a day after his teamreleased GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery. In asocial media postannouncing his departure, 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. OpenAI is also losing Srinivas Narayanan, its chief technology officer of enterprise applications,Wired reports. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family. This article was updated to include the departure of Srinivas Narayanan.