OpenAI is going through a rough patch. Three top executives announced their departures at virtually the same time, each in a separate social media post. Kevin Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan have left the company, which just a few years ago appeared to be an unstoppable machine.
Who left and why
Kevin Weil joined OpenAI in 2024 as chief product officer. Before that, he held leadership roles at Meta and Twitter, both major companies in their own right. But at OpenAI, he soon switched to another project: he launched OpenAI for Science, an initiative aimed at building a platform to accelerate scientific discoveries using artificial intelligence. And now, after two years, he has announced his departure.
“They were two mind-expanding years,” Weil wrote on X. OpenAI responded tersely to his departure: the team will be “decentralized,” and its work will be transferred to other research groups. In practical terms, Prism, the scientific work platform led by Weil, is being moved under Codex, the developer assistant that OpenAI is expanding beyond simply writing code.
Bill Peebles joined the company in 2023 and became the face behind Sora, an app for generating short videos. After its launch, Sora climbed to the top of the App Store. Peebles was clearly proud of it. “I’m proud of all the sleepless nights the team put in before and after the launch,” he wrote. But OpenAI quietly killed off Sora a month ago. The reason? Costs and the need to conserve computing resources ahead of a planned IPO.
Srinivas Narayanan, chief technology officer for enterprise applications, announced his departure for an entirely different reason. He wants to spend more time with his family. According to people familiar with the situation, his decision is unrelated to the departures of Weil or Peebles.
A few weeks earlier, Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s head of product and business, announced that she was taking medical leave due to a worsening neuroimmune condition. Chief marketing officer Kate Rouch decided to leave so she could focus fully on cancer treatment. Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap moved to an unspecified role focused on “special projects.”
Is this a company that can still afford such upheaval? Or an organization beginning to shake at its foundations?
OpenAI cuts back and narrows its focus
There is a clear strategy behind all these moves. OpenAI is shedding side projects and focusing on what could generate revenue. Sora is gone. OpenAI for Science has been broken up and absorbed into other teams. The company wants to become profitable, primarily by selling to businesses in the so-called B2B segment. This is a business model in which a company sells its products or services to other companies rather than to end customers.
This direction is being driven by Fidji Simo, albeit currently from a hospital room. OpenAI wants to go public, and to do that it needs to show that it can make money. ChatGPT is popular; no one disputes that. But whether it can sustain a company that continues to raise the largest private investment rounds in history over the long term is another question.
Last month, OpenAI closed an investment round that valued it at $852 billion. And yet the company is still not profitable.
Anthropic is growing faster than ever
While OpenAI deals with internal turbulence, Anthropic is quietly reaping the rewards of its success. At the HumanX conference, a TechCrunch reporter spoke with a number of developers and companies. The conclusion? ChatGPT is good, but Claude Code is what everyone is talking about.
Anthropic is currently accepting investment offers that value it at up to $800 billion, more than double its February valuation. Amazon also announced that it will invest up to an additional $25 billion in Anthropic.
TechCrunch experts point out that OpenAI is clearly more concerned about Anthropic’s progress than anything else. And that makes sense. The enterprise and developer segment is currently where the real money is. And that is precisely where Anthropic is pushing hardest.
A company at a crossroads
OpenAI is facing two problems at once. It needs a product that will generate enough revenue to justify its astronomical valuation. And it needs the public to see it as a company worthy of trust.
Executive departures, project cuts, ill leaders, and growing pressure from Anthropic. All of this is happening just as OpenAI is talking about going public. Investors and developers are taking notice.
Sources: businessinsider.com and newyorker.com
