Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan all announced their departures from OpenAI on the same day. Between them, they built ChatGPT's product experience, created Sora from scratch, and scaled the enterprise engineering operation from 40 people to a major division. All three left on Friday.

The exits come as OpenAI kills what leadership internally calls 'side quests': consumer-facing moonshot projects that no longer fit a company pivoting hard toward enterprise AI. Sora, the AI video tool that peaked at one million users before collapsing to fewer than 500,000, is being discontinued. The web and app versions shut down April 26. The API follows September 24. The product cost roughly $1 million per day to operate.

OpenAI for Science, the initiative Weil was hired to lead, is being 'decentralized.' That is corporate language for dismantled. The team's work continues within other groups, but the independent unit no longer exists.

The Roster of Departed Leaders

Of OpenAI's 11 co-founders, only Sam Altman and Greg Brockman remain. The departed list includes co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, CTO Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, VP of research Barret Zoph, co-founder John Schulman, and at least a dozen other senior executives who left in 2025 alone.

The destinations tell the story. Schulman went to Anthropic. Tim Brooks, who co-led Sora before Peebles, went to Google DeepMind and then to Meta's Superintelligence Labs. Shengjia Zhao, a key architect of ChatGPT and GPT-4, became chief scientist at Meta Superintelligence Labs. Approximately seven additional researchers followed him. Liam Fedus, VP of research, left to co-found Periodic Labs. The talent is not retiring. It is being redistributed to competitors who are, in several cases, building the same products with the same people.

The Leadership Vacuum

The timing compounds the problem. Fidji Simo, the chief of product and business, took medical leave in early April. Brockman is temporarily overseeing product. Brad Lightcap, the COO, has been shifted to 'special projects.' Kate Rouch, the CMO, is departing to focus on cancer recovery.

OpenAI has added Denise Dresser, the former CEO of Slack, as chief revenue officer. The signal is clear: the company that wanted to build artificial general intelligence is now building a sales organization.

The Numbers

OpenAI's monthly revenue has reached approximately $2 billion, with an annualized run rate exceeding $25 billion. The company closed a $122 billion funding round at an $852 billion valuation and has more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users. Enterprise revenue now accounts for more than 40% of the total.

The cost side is less comfortable. OpenAI projects $14 billion in losses on $25 billion in revenue this year, with cumulative spending through 2029 estimated at $115 billion. It expects to reach cash-flow positive by 2029 and targets $200 billion in revenue by 2030. Those projections require everything to go right: enterprise adoption must accelerate, compute costs must decline, and the competitive threat from Anthropic, Google, and Meta must be contained.

Losing the executives who built the products driving that revenue makes the path harder. Losing them to the competitors makes it worse.

First reported by The Next Web. Additional context from CNBC and AIToolly.