OpenAI’s former Sora boss is leaving
Sora head Bill Peebles, as well as the company’s VP of AI for Science, are departing the company.
Sora head Bill Peebles, as well as the company’s VP of AI for Science, are departing the company.
by Jay Peters
Apr 17, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC
Image: The Verge
Jay Peters
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Last month, OpenAI gave up on its Sora video generation tool, and on Friday, the Sora team’s leader, Bill Peebles, announced that he is leaving the company. OpenAI has been shifting its priorities as part of an effort to avoid “side quests,” and Peebles’ departure is just one of many recent changes as the company moves to focus more on coding and enterprise use.
As part of a note Peebles posted on X, he said:
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. It’s tempting in life to mode collapse to the most important thing, but cultivating entropy is the only way for a research lab to thrive long-term, and Sam deeply understands this. Sora was a project that could not have happened anywhere but OpenAI, and I will always deeply love this place for that.
Kevin Weil, who was the company’s VP of AI for Science and was formerly its chief product officer, is also departing, saying that Friday is his last day. He said in a post on X that the group is “being decentralized into other research teams.” OpenAI’s Prism, a recently-announced research-focused “workspace for scientists” that Weil was heading up, is being sunsetted, and OpenAI’s plan is to fold its capabilities into the Codex desktop app, according to Wired.
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- Jay Peters
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