Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles Leave OpenAI as Company Shuts Down Sora and Its Science Division

OpenAI is going through another wave of high-profile departures: chief product officer Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles, the researcher who led development of the Sora video generator, are leaving the company. At the same time, OpenAI announced it is shutting down the Sora project itself and disbanding its internal science division. Together these point to a radical strategic turn: the company is moving away from consumer experiments and concentrating on the enterprise market.

Kevin Weil became OpenAI's CPO in early 2024, arriving from Instagram and Pinterest. His job was to build out the product organization during ChatGPT's explosive growth. Under his watch, the company launched a number of consumer products and significantly expanded monetization: by 2025 the number of paying ChatGPT users exceeded 10 million, and annual revenue topped 3 billion dollars. Even so, pressure was building inside the company: investors were demanding returns ever more insistently, and the focus was inevitably shifting toward B2B and the API.

Bill Peebles was one of the key developers of Sora, the generative video model OpenAI unveiled to the public in February 2024. The announcement landed like a bombshell: clips generated from text descriptions were strikingly realistic. But the road from demo to product proved rocky. Broad access to Sora opened only in December 2024, and by then competitors such as Runway, Kling and Google Veo had already taken a significant share of the market. According to available information, Sora's commercial results fell short of expectations, which sealed the project's fate.

The shutdown of Sora and the dissolution of the science division fit a broader pattern. In recent months OpenAI has steadily been cutting what people inside the company call "side quests": projects that were technically interesting but made no obvious contribution to the core business. The company has focused on ChatGPT Enterprise, the API and infrastructure for agentic systems. In early 2025 it also closed a record funding round of 40 billion dollars at a 300 billion valuation, and under that kind of investor pressure, years of experimenting with products for end users become a luxury.

The departures of Weil and Peebles are not just a personnel rotation. They signal that OpenAI is entering a phase of operational maturity. The company is choosing a clear business model over the chase for viral products. For competitors in generative video, this is good news: there will be less direct competition from OpenAI. For enterprise customers, it confirms that B2B is becoming the top priority. And for the industry as a whole, it is a reminder that the era of "launch it and see what sticks" is gradually fading at big AI companies.

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