OpenAI Is Losing the Executives Who Came to Build AI for Science
OpenAI keeps losing the people most committed to making AI that serves science. Nobody is explaining why.
Kevin Weil is the third senior executive in recent months to leave or step back from a role focused on how OpenAI's technology actually gets used. Fidji Simo, who runs the company's AGI deployment work and has spoken publicly about AI's responsibility to the research community, is on medical leave. Kate Rouch, the chief marketing officer who argued for a more measured AI rollout, is also on leave. Greg Brockman, cofounder and president, is now overseeing products in the interim. WIRED confirmed Weil's departure.
Weil joined OpenAI in June 2024. His final seven months were spent running OpenAI for Science, the division he built around the pitch that 2026 would be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineering. He launched Prism, an AI workspace for researchers, on January 27. OpenAI has now discontinued Prism and folded the roughly 10-person science team into Codex, the coding application OpenAI is restructuring as a desktop product — a single app designed to handle everything from email to coding to research queries. The ambition is coherent. The cost is the teams that don't fit it.
ChatGPT was already receiving 8.4 million messages a week on advanced scientific topics when Prism launched, TechCrunch reported in January. That was Prism's addressable market. It is gone now, along with the team that built for it.
OpenAI has also discontinued Sora, its video-generation app, as part of the same consolidation. Resources are flowing toward the superapp vision. The executives still standing are the ones pushing a unified product across ChatGPT, Codex, and the Atlas browser — not the ones who came to build specialized tools for scientists.
Whether this is a company finding its focus or a company abandoning the people who believed its stated mission is a question OpenAI's next product decisions will answer. What is clear: the executives who joined to build AI tools for science are not in the room anymore. The ones who are have a different agenda.