OpenAI is losing two of its most ambitious moonshot architects. Kevin Weil, who led the company’s scientific research initiatives, and Bill Peebles, a researcher behind the AI video tool Sora, both announced their retirements on Friday. The exit comes as OpenAI consolidates around enterprise AI and its upcoming “super apps.”
The exit follows OpenAI’s decision to cut back on “side quests,” including bets for customers like Sora and OpenAI for Science. Sora was losing an estimated $1 million a day in computational costs and shut down last month.
OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promises to accelerate scientific discovery. Weil’s social media post announcing the news said the research was being absorbed by “other research teams.”
“It’s been a mind-expanding two years from being chief product officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Science acceleration will be one of the most amazingly positive outcomes of our AGI efforts.”
After the official announcement in October 2025, the team has had a short and arduous journey. Weil deleted a tweet claiming that GPT-5 had solved Erdos’ 10 previously unsolved mathematical problems, but that claim quickly fell apart after being criticized by mathematicians who run the website erdosproblems.com.
Weil’s departure comes a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life science research and drug discovery.
In a social media post announcing his departure, Peebles praised Sola for sparking “huge investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the type of research that produced video tools needed space away from the company’s main roadmap.
“Increasing entropy is the only way for a laboratory to thrive in the long term,” he writes.
