Three senior OpenAI executives exited simultaneously on Friday as the company dismantles its most ambitious consumer projects in a sharp pivot toward enterprise revenue. Kevin Weil, who led the science research initiative, Bill Peebles, architect of the Sora video generator, and Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer for enterprise applications, all announced their departures within hours of each other.
The coordinated exits follow OpenAI's decision to shutter Sora last month after just six months of operation. The video generation tool was reportedly burning through $1 million daily in compute costs while serving fewer than 500,000 users at its peak.
Web and app versions will cease operation on April 26, with API support ending September 24.
OpenAI for Science, the research group behind recently launched GPT-Rosalind for life sciences discovery, is being absorbed into other teams. Weil described his two-year tenure as "a mind-expanding two years" in a social media post announcing his departure one day after his team released the new drug discovery model.
Peebles credited Sora with igniting "a huge amount of investment in video across the industry" but acknowledged that cultivating what he called "entropy" is essential for research labs to thrive long-term. His departure comes as OpenAI abandons its trademark fight over the "Cameo" feature name, dropping a Ninth Circuit appeal because Sora no longer exists.
The triple departure continues a pattern that has reshaped OpenAI's leadership over two years. Only two of the company's eleven original co-founders remain: CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. At least twelve senior executives left in 2025 alone, with many joining competitors like Anthropic or Meta's Superintelligence Labs.
OpenAI's shift comes amid financial pressures despite impressive growth metrics. The company reached $2 billion monthly revenue with an annualized run rate exceeding $25 billion following a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation earlier this year.
However, projected losses stand at $14 billion against that revenue.
Enterprise business now accounts for more than 40% of total revenue and is expected to reach parity with consumer income by year's end. The company added former Slack CEO Denise Dresser as chief revenue officer last month while chief product officer Fidji Simo took medical leave in early April.
Narayanan spent three years building ChatGPT's engineering infrastructure before departing to spend time with family. His exit alongside Weil and Peebles marks what internal sources describe as the end of "side quests", consumer-facing moonshot projects that no longer fit a company consolidating around core enterprise products.
