OpenAI faced unusual departures as three key leaders – Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan – left the company on the same day. The exits come as the Sam Altman-led firm restructures parts of its business, including shutting down its Sora video AI project and redistributing teams like ‘OpenAI for Science’. While Narayanan cited personal reasons, the other departures are closely tied to these changes.
Kevin Weil, who had been one of the company’s most senior product leaders, was responsible for initiatives aimed at applying AI to scientific research. His division, often referred to internally as ‘OpenAI for Science’, focused on building tools that could assist researchers in areas like biology, chemistry, and physics. However, the company has now decided to dismantle this unit, folding parts of it into the core product and developer teams. The move shows a shift away from standalone experimental programs toward tighter integration with revenue-generating services.
Meanwhile, Bill Peebles’ exit follows the discontinuation of Sora, OpenAI’s ambitious text-to-video generation system. Sora had been widely seen as a breakthrough in generative AI, capable of producing realistic video clips from simple prompts. Early demonstrations generated significant industry buzz and positioned the ChatGPT maker at the forefront of AI-driven media creation. But maintaining and scaling the system proved to be extremely costly, with daily operational expenses reportedly reaching around $1 million at peak usage. Despite its technical achievements, Sora struggled to turn that momentum into steady user interest and a clear way to make money, which eventually led to its shutdown.
In parallel, Srinivas Narayanan – who served as CTO for OpenAI’s enterprise and business applications – played a crucial role in building the company’s commercial infrastructure. He oversaw the expansion of APIs and enterprise-grade deployments of ChatGPT, helping transform the AI giant from a research-focused organization into a major provider of AI services for businesses. His departure, though officially attributed to personal reasons, comes at a time when the company is recalibrating how it manages and scales its enterprise offerings.
These exits are also part of a longer trend of leaders leaving OpenAI. Over the past two years, several high-profile figures have left the company, some moving to competitors like Anthropic or major technology firms, while others have launched their own ventures. Of the original founding team, only a small number remain actively involved. The timing of the recent departures becomes even more critical as OpenAI is growing but also facing high costs. The company is making about $2 billion a month (~ $25 billion a year), yet it could still lose about $14 billion this year due to the expense of running advanced AI systems and investing in infrastructure and research.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
