Three OpenAI executives announced their departures on Friday. Kevin Weil, vice president of OpenAI for Science and formerly chief product officer, said Friday was his last day. [1] Bill Peebles, who led the shut-down Sora video team, posted his own exit hours earlier. [1] Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer of B2B Applications, told colleagues he was leaving to spend more time with family. [1]

The paper wrote yesterday about the week that saw Sam Altman's home targeted twice in three days and the New Yorker profile land. Friday's departures extend the same arc of consolidation. OpenAI for Science is being absorbed into other research teams; Prism, the scientific-workspace product Weil led, is being folded into the Codex desktop app, per Wired. [2] Sora, which had been losing an estimated $1 million a day in compute costs, was shut down last month. [2]

Peebles' post read as an argument against what he was leaving. "I am immensely grateful to Sam, Mark, Aditya and Jakub for fostering a research environment that allowed us to pursue ideas off-the-beaten path from the company's mainline roadmap," he wrote. "Cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term, and Sam deeply understands this." [3] Weil said his group was "being decentralized into other research teams." [3]

The exits follow Fidji Simo's April medical leave and marketing chief Kate Rouch's earlier step-down for cancer recovery. [1] OpenAI's official line from a company spokesperson is that it is decentralizing OpenAI for Science "in an effort to bring its work closer to the teams that are building leading model capabilities, products and infrastructure." [1] TechCrunch called the shuttered programs "side quests." [2] What remains is a superapp and an IPO path. What left on Friday were three people who led the side of the house that looked most like a research lab.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco