WIRED has confirmed that Kevin Weil, former chief product officer at OpenAI who was recently tapped to build Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists, is leaving the company. Weil was previously an early product executive at Instagram.
“Today is my last day at OpenAI as OpenAI for Science is being distributed to other research teams,” Weil said in a social media post on Friday, shortly after WIRED reported his departure. “It’s been a mind-expanding two years from being Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science.”
Weil did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
OpenAI also plans to retire Prism, which the company launched as a web app in January to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is building a team of about 10 people under Thibault Sottiaux, head of Codex at OpenAI, and is looking to incorporate Prism’s capabilities into its desktop Codex app. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the change, telling WIRED that it is part of the company’s efforts to integrate its business and product strategies. OpenAI has broad ambitions to turn its AI coding application, Codex, into an “app for everything.”
Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he was starting a new initiative within the company called OpenAI for Science. Currently, OpenAI distributes these employees across the company’s product, research, and infrastructure teams. An OpenAI spokesperson reiterated the company’s commitment to accelerating scientific discovery, saying this is one of the clearest ways AI can benefit humanity. Earlier on Friday, the company announced GPT-Rosalind, a new series of AI models built to help life science researchers work faster.
OpenAI is refocusing on several key areas, including enterprise services and coding, as the company faces increasing pressure from rivals like Anthropic and prepares to file for an IPO later this year. In March, OpenAI’s CEO of AGI Deployment, Fiji Simo, told staff that the company needed to simplify its product offering. OpenAI is discontinuing its Sora video generation app in an effort to redirect resources to more important initiatives.
Unrelated to Weil’s news, two other executives announced their departure from OpenAI on Friday. Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI’s chief technology officer for enterprise applications, announced internally that he is leaving the company to spend time with his family. Mr. Narayanan joined OpenAI as Vice President of Engineering. And Bill Peebles, head of Sora, posted on X that his work at OpenAI is also over.
The departures of Weil, Peebles and Narayanan are just the latest in a series of leadership changes at OpenAI. The company recently announced a major reorganization of its leadership team as Mr. Simo took a leave of absence to focus on his health. In the same announcement, OpenAI announced that co-founder and president Greg Brockman will be overseeing the company’s products for the time being, and that its chief marketing officer Kate Ruesch will be taking a leave of absence due to health 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 all the fuss in a recent blog post. “I’m also very aware that OpenAI is now a major platform rather than a shoddy startup. We now need to operate in a more predictable way,” he wrote. “It’s been a very intense, chaotic, high-pressure few years.”
