“Today is my last day at OpenAI, as OpenAI for Science is being decentralized to other research teams,” Weil said in a social media post on Friday, shortly after WIRED reported his departure. “From becoming Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for science, it’s been a mind-expanding two years.”
Weil did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
OpenAI is also killing Prism, which the company launched as a web app in January to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is adding a roughly 10-person team behind it under OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sotiaux, and aims to incorporate Prism’s capabilities into its desktop Codex app. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed the changes and told WIRED it’s part of the company’s effort to integrate its business and product strategy. OpenAI has broader ambitions to turn its AI coding application Codex into an “everything app.”
Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he would launch a new initiative inside the company called OpenAI for Science. Now, OpenAI is spreading those employees across the company’s product, research and infrastructure teams. An OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the company’s commitment to accelerating scientific discovery and said this is one of the most obvious ways AI can benefit humanity. Earlier on Friday, the company announced a new series of AI models—GPT-Rosalind—to help life sciences researchers work faster.
OpenAI is trying to refocus the company on some key areas like enterprise offerings and coding, as the company faces increasing pressure from rivals like Anthropic and is set to file for an IPO later this year. In March, Fiji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI deployments, told employees that the company needed to simplify its product offering. OpenAI discontinued its Sora video-generation app as a result of pressure to divert resources toward more productive efforts.
Unrelated to Weil’s news, two other executives announced Friday they were leaving OpenAI. Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of enterprise applications for OpenAI, announced internally that he is leaving the company to spend time with his family. Narayanan joined OpenAI as the company’s vice president of engineering. And Bill Peebles, head of Sora, posted on X that he also worked at OpenAI.
The exits of Weil, Peebles and Narayanan are the latest in a series of executive changes at OpenAI. The company recently announced a major restructuring of its executive team as Simo took medical leave to focus on his health. In the same announcement, OpenAI said that co-founder and president Greg Brockman would oversee the company’s products in the interim, and that the company’s chief marketing officer, Kate Rauch, would take a leave of absence due to medical issues. Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap also transitioned to a “special projects” role as part of the restructuring.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to acknowledge the various turmoil in a recent blog post. “I’m also acutely aware that OpenAI is now a major platform, not a scrappy startup, and we now need to act in a more predictable way,” he wrote. “It has been an extremely intense, chaotic and high-pressure few years.”
<a href