OpenAI continues to witness senior personnel changes when two key figures Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles simultaneously leave the company.
This move comes as the US technology company is restructuring its strategy, focusing on corporate artificial intelligence and a super app expected to be launched soon.
Kevin Weil is the leader of OpenAI's internal scientific research initiative, while Bill Peebles is known as the researcher behind the AI video tool Sora.
Their departure took place immediately after OpenAI decided to cut back on sub-projects, which were no longer suitable for the company's main development orientation.
Among them, Sora is an AI video creation project that once attracted great attention and is said to cost operating costs of up to about 1 million USD per day due to huge calculation requirements.
This project has been suspended since last month. According to analysts, the termination of Sora reflects cost pressure and the need to optimize resources as OpenAI shifts to products with higher commercialization potential.
Another project that is also affected is OpenAI for Science, an internal research group that develops the Prism platform to promote scientific discovery using AI.
This group is now merged into other research units. In a share on social networks, Kevin Weil said that the past two years have been a memorable journey, while emphasizing the potential of artificial intelligence in promoting science, especially in the goal of moving towards AGI.
However, the journey of OpenAI for Science is not entirely smooth. After its launch in October 2025, the project quickly became controversial when a statement related to the ability to solve difficult problems of the GPT-5 model was rejected by experts.
The incident partly shows the challenge in balancing technological ambitions and scientific authenticity.
Notably, Kevin Weil left just one day after his team announced GPT-Rosalind (a new model aimed at accelerating life science research and drug discovery).
This shows that scientific projects are still being developed, but may be in a different organizational structure.
Meanwhile, Bill Peebles assessed that Sora has contributed to promoting a strong wave of investment in AI video technology throughout the industry.
He believes that such breakthrough research needs to be separated from the main product roadmap to have an independent development space.
Not only the two personnel above, OpenAI is also said to have lost Srinivas Narayanan, who is the Chief Technology Officer of enterprise application.
The continuous separation of key personnel shows that OpenAI is entering a clearer strategic repositioning phase.
Instead of spreading resources across multiple research directions, the company seems to be prioritizing products that are widely deployable and generate stable revenue.
