OpenAI's two top executives, Bill Peebles and Kevin Weil, resigned on the same day! The department OpenAI for Science is immediately disbanded.

On April 17, 2026, Bill Peebles, the core responsible person for OpenAI’s video generation model Sora, and Kevin Weil, former Chief Product Officer (CPO) and founder of OpenAI for Science, announced their departure on the same day.
(Background: Power shortage to tears! WSJ: Blackwell rent increased 48% in two months, Anthropic’s slow progress causes companies to jump ship)
(Additional background: 10 years of grudges: If OpenAI had not been hypocritical, Anthropic wouldn’t be so powerful)

Table of Contents

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• Peebles bids farewell to Sora: “Zero-to-one is a once-in-a-lifetime honor”
• The day after GPT-Rosalind’s release, the two walk together
• OpenAI returns to the corporate main battlefield

Sora was shut down last month, with an estimated daily operational loss of about $1 million, and Bill Peebles, who took it from a small team to a formal release, chose to leave after the department was disbanded.

On the same day, CPO Kevin Weil also announced his departure on X, and OpenAI for Science, led by him, will no longer exist as an independent department.

Peebles bids farewell to Sora: “Zero-to-one is a once-in-a-lifetime honor”

Bill Peebles’s farewell post on X was calm in tone but emotionally rich. He said that building Sora from scratch with his team was an honor and a great adventure in his life.

After the release of Sora 2, he chose to leave.

I have decided to leave OpenAI. Below is the letter I shared with my team. Building Sora from zero with you all has been my lifetime honor and adventure. As this team knows well, one of the best parts of making videos is seeing the model’s expansion patterns firsthand…

The shutdown of Sora was not due to product competition failure but was the result of computational cost pressures.

GPT-Rosalind’s release the day after, the two walk together

On April 16, Kevin Weil-led OpenAI for Science team officially released GPT-Rosalind, naming the model after Rosalind Franklin, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, focusing on life sciences reasoning. Collaborating clients include Amgen, Moderna, the Allen Institute, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

The launch event was lively, but the next day Weil announced it was his last day at OpenAI. He wrote on X:

Today is my last day at OpenAI because OpenAI for Science is being dispersed and integrated into other research teams. These two years have opened my eyes wide—from Chief Product Officer to joining research teams and founding OpenAI for Science.

OpenAI returns to the corporate main battlefield

Bloomberg interprets this personnel adjustment as OpenAI continuing to cut “side quests,” consolidating resources toward enterprise AI and superapp directions.

Sora belongs to consumer-level video generation, which is costly and slow to monetize; OpenAI for Science follows an academic research route, which is also distant from OpenAI’s current commercial main battlefield. The sequential closure of these two lines aligns with this broader strategy.