Kevin Weil, OpenAI former product manager who was recently hired to create a new AI workspace for scientists, Prism, is leaving the company, WIRED has confirmed. Weil was previously one of the first leaders leading product on Instagram.
“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. job Friday, shortly after WIRED announced his departure. “It’s been a rewarding two years, from being Director of Product to joining the research team and launching OpenAI for Science.”
Weil did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
OpenAI also terminates Prism, which the company spear as a web app in January to give scientists a better way to work with AI. The company is bringing together the team of around 10 people behind it under the leadership of OpenAI’s head of Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, and aims to integrate Prism’s capabilities into its Codex desktop application. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the changes and told WIRED that it was part of the company’s efforts to unify its business and product strategy. OpenAI has broader ambitions: to transform Codex, its AI coding application, into an “app for everything.”
Weil, who joined OpenAI in June 2024, announced last September that he would launch a new initiative within the company called OpenAI for Science. Now, OpenAI disperses these 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 clearest ways AI can benefit humanity. Earlier Friday, the company announced a new series of AI models, GPT-Rosalind, designed to help life sciences researchers work faster.
OpenAI is trying to refocus the company around a few key areas, such as enterprise offerings and coding, as the company faces increasing pressure from businesses. rivals like Anthropic and is preparing to file for an IPO later this year. In March, OpenAI CEO of AGI deployment, Fiji Simo, told staff that the company needed to simplify its product offering. The desire to divert resources to larger efforts led OpenAI to discontinue its Sora video generation app.
Unrelated to Weil’s news, two other executives announced Friday that they were leaving OpenAI. OpenAI’s enterprise applications technology director, Srinivas Narayanan, has announced internally that he is leaving the company to spend time with his family. Narayanan had joined OpenAI as the company’s vice president of engineering. And Bill Peebles, director of Sora, job on X which he had also completed at OpenAI.
The departures of Weil, Peebles and Narayanan are just the latest in a series of shakeups within OpenAI’s leadership. The company recently announced a major reorganization of its management team while Simo took sick 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 on an interim basis and that the company’s chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch, would take a leave of absence due to medical issues. Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap also moved to a “special projects” role as part of the restructuring.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemed to acknowledge the various upheavals that have occurred recently. blog post. “I am also very aware that OpenAI is now a major platform, not a scrappy startup, and we now need to operate in a more predictable way,” he wrote. “It has been an extremely intense, chaotic and high-pressure few years.”
