OpenAI is undergoing a significant strategic transformation.Recently, three senior executives of the company - Kevin Weir, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan - announced their resignation on the same day. This coincided with the company shutting down a number of experimental projects, causing the industry to pay attention to its development direction.
This wave of departures continues a trend of the past two years. Currently, of the 11 co-founders of OpenAI, only Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are still on the job.
It is reported that the three executives left for their own reasons: Kevin Weir was in charge of the scientific department of OpenAI, and his research unit will no longer exist as an independent project; Bill Peebles, the developer of the video generation model Sora, called this experience "a lifetime of honor and adventure"; Srinivas Narayanan said that he will leave to accompany his family. He has helped the large-scale development of ChatGPT and its API.
The departure of senior executives reflects the shift in OpenAI's strategic focus.Sora, the AI video tool that has attracted much attention, will shut down its web page and application version on April 26, and will also stop API services later.
Although Sora had about 1 million users at its peak, its usage has declined sharply, with average daily operating costs as high as $1 million, and it also faces challenges to its intellectual property rights from the Motion Picture Association of America.
In addition, OpenAI’s scientific department will also be “decentralized” and its work will be reallocated to other research teams.
In the past two years,OpenAI has suffered a number of core talent losses, with many executives and researchers switching to competitors or startups such as Anthropic and Meta.
