Kevin Wale and Bill Pebbles Depart OpenAI: Company Shuts Down Sora and Research Division

OpenAI is experiencing another wave of prominent departures: the company is losing product director Kevin Weil and Bill Pebbles — the researcher who led the development of the Sora video generator. Simultaneously, OpenAI announced the closure of the Sora project itself and the disbanding of its internal research department. All this signals a radical strategic shift: the company is moving away from consumer experiments and focusing on the corporate market.

Kevin Weil took the position of CPO at OpenAI in early 2024, coming from Instagram and Pinterest. His task was to build a product direction during the period of explosive ChatGPT growth. During his tenure, the company launched a series of consumer products and significantly expanded monetization: the number of paid ChatGPT users exceeded 10 million by 2025, and annual revenue surpassed 3 billion dollars.

Nevertheless, pressure was mounting within the company: investors increasingly demanded returns, and focus inevitably shifted toward B2B and API. Bill Pebbles is one of the key developers of Sora, the generative video model that OpenAI presented to the public in February 2024. The announcement had a bombshell effect: videos generated from text descriptions struck viewers with their realism.

However, the path from demo to product proved thorny. Wide access to Sora only opened in December 2024, and by then competitors — Runway, Kling, and Google Veo — had already captured significant market share. According to available information, Sora's commercial results did not meet expectations, which predetermined the project's fate.

The closure of Sora and the disbanding of the research department fit into a broader trend. In recent months, OpenAI has consistently scaled back what the company internally calls "side quests" — projects that were technically interesting but did not provide clear contribution to the core business. The company has focused on ChatGPT Enterprise, API, and infrastructure for agentic systems.

In parallel, in early 2025 it closed a record funding round of 40 billion dollars at a valuation of 300 billion — and under such investor pressure, years-long experiments with consumer products become a luxury. The departures of Weil and Pebbles are not simply personnel rotation. This is a signal that OpenAI is entering a phase of operational maturity.

The company is choosing a clear business model instead of chasing viral products. For competitors in the generative video segment, this is good news: direct competition with OpenAI will lessen. For corporate clients, it is confirmation that the B2B direction is becoming the top priority.

And for the entire industry, it is a reminder: the era of "launch it and see what sticks" at major AI companies is gradually becoming a thing of the past.