A major shakeup seems to have happened at the highest levels at OpenAI.
OpenAI’s former Chief Product Officer (and current VP of OpenAI Science) Kevin Weil, CTO of B2B Applications Srinivas Narayanan and Bill Peebles, who was the head of Sora, have all left the company. All three today shared their resignation notes on social media within hours of each other.
Kevin Weil: From CPO to Science — and Out
Weil’s departure closes a chapter that began with him as one of OpenAI’s most visible executives. A frequent voice on the company’s product strategy, he had publicly championed bold predictions — including that AI would surpass humans at competitive coding and that intelligence was getting 10x cheaper every year.
After stepping back from the CPO role, Weil moved to lead OpenAI for Science — an internal research group built around Prism, a platform aimed at accelerating scientific discovery. His tenure there was eventful. He faced public criticism after deleting a tweet that incorrectly claimed GPT-5 had solved ten unsolved Erdős mathematical problems, a claim quickly debunked by a mathematician. One day before announcing his departure, his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model targeting life sciences research and drug discovery.
In his farewell post, Weil noted that OpenAI for Science is being “decentralized into other research teams,” and struck an optimistic note: “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.”
Srinivas Narayanan: B2B Apps CTO
Narayanan exits after three years, during which he oversaw some of OpenAI’s most consequential engineering work. He led the Applied Engineering team when it was a roughly 40-person operation at OpenAI’s 575 office, and helped ship ChatGPT and the API — products he described as among “the fastest-growing in history,” built with “no real playbook.”
He was later elevated to CTO of B2B Applications, responsible for enterprise and government products, reporting to COO Brad Lightcap. In his note to the team, Narayanan cited the timing of recent and upcoming product launches as a natural inflection point to step back. He also mentioned plans to spend time with his aging parents in India before deciding what comes next.
Bill Peebles: Building Video App Sora
OpenAI had shuttered Sora last month, and it appears that its head now will depart as well. In a post announcing his departure on X, Bill Peebles traced the Sora project back to a two-person effort in July 2023, at a time when there was widespread skepticism inside and outside OpenAI that high-fidelity, 1080p multi-shot video generation was achievable within a year. The team got there in seven months.
Sora went on to top the Apple App Store charts after launch, but was shut down last month — reportedly burning through approximately $1 million per day in compute costs. Peebles’ exit follows the product’s wind-down and reflects OpenAI’s broader retreat from what it has internally referred to as “side quests.”
His parting message included a pointed philosophical note: “Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term, and Sam deeply understands this.”
The Bigger Picture: OpenAI Cuts the Side Quests
The three exits land at a crucial moment. OpenAI is doubling down on enterprise AI and a forthcoming “superapp,” and appears to be systematically winding down projects that don’t map directly to that roadmap. Sora and OpenAI for Science are both casualties of this consolidation.
The leadership shakeup is striking in its pace. Just weeks ago, Fidji Simo, CEO of Applications, went on medical leave and COO Brad Lightcap moved to a special projects role — a notable hollowing out of OpenAI’s commercial leadership layer. Beyond Weil, Narayanan and Peebles, several other OpenAI employees have walked out over strategic and ethical disagreements in recent months. And OpenAI is far from alone — a broader wave of AI researchers has left large labs to launch their own startups, drawn by the opportunity to build on their own terms.
For now, all three departing executives expressed genuine warmth toward the company and the teams they’re leaving behind. None announced what’s next. The AI industry will be watching closely.