Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles Depart OpenAI Amid Strategic Pivot to Enterprise AI

OpenAI is undergoing significant leadership changes as two key executives—Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles—announced their departures on Friday, marking the latest phase of the company's strategic pivot away from ambitious experimental projects toward enterprise-focused artificial intelligence.

Weil, who served as OpenAI's Chief Product Officer before leading the company's science research initiative, and Peebles, the principal researcher behind the AI video generation tool Sora, both exited the company as part of what observers describe as OpenAI shedding its "side quests." The departures signal a deliberate consolidation of resources around the company's core business priorities and its forthcoming enterprise superapp.

The exits coincide with OpenAI's recent decision to discontinue several high-cost projects that, while technologically impressive, did not align with the company's narrowed focus. Sora, the AI video generation tool that garnered significant industry attention, was shut down last month after burning through an estimated $1 million per day in compute costs. Similarly, OpenAI for Science—the internal research group that Weil led and which developed Prism, a platform designed to accelerate scientific discovery—is being dissolved, with its functions and personnel absorbed into other research teams within the organization.

Weil's departure came notably just a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model aimed at accelerating life sciences research and drug discovery, underscoring the tension between the company's scientific ambitions and its shifting business strategy. In announcing his exit, Weil reflected on his two-year tenure at the company, describing it as "mind-expanding" and expressing continued conviction that "accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI." However, the science initiative faced public scrutiny following its October 2025 launch, when claims of breakthroughs in solving Erdős mathematical problems were quickly debunked by the mathematician overseeing the problem database.

Peebles, for his part, credited Sora with catalyzing a "huge amount of investment in video across the industry," but argued that the kind of research required to develop such tools demands separation from the company's mainline product roadmap—a philosophical stance that appears to have lost favor within OpenAI's current strategic direction.

The leadership shake-up reflects broader organizational challenges as OpenAI navigates rapid scaling, intensifying competition in the generative AI space, and the need to balance moonshot ambitions with profitable, enterprise-focused offerings. The company's consolidation strategy suggests a deliberate choice to prioritize near-term business goals over experimental initiatives, even those with potentially transformative scientific applications.