Kevin Weil
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Kevin Weil is an American technology executive and product leader who served as Chief Product Officer (CPO) of OpenAI from 2024 to 2025, then as the vice president who founded and led OpenAI for Science, a research group launched in 2025 to apply artificial intelligence to scientific discovery. Before OpenAI he spent roughly fifteen years building consumer and developer products at several defining companies of the social and mobile era, including Senior Vice President of Product at Twitter, Vice President of Product at Instagram, Vice President of Product for the Facebook cryptocurrency effort behind Libra and Novi, and President of Product and Business at the Earth-imaging company Planet Labs. Weil left OpenAI on April 17, 2026, when the company decentralized OpenAI for Science into its other research teams.[12][13]
Weil is best known as a product executive who has led the product organizations of three consecutive era-defining platforms, Twitter, Instagram, and OpenAI, after beginning his career as a physicist. He was one of Twitter's first several dozen employees and helped scale it through its 2013 initial public offering, ran product at Instagram during its growth past one billion users, co-created Facebook's Libra digital currency, and in June 2024 became OpenAI's first Chief Product Officer, the executive responsible for turning the company's research into products such as ChatGPT.[1][3][5] OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said on hiring him and CFO Sarah Friar that the pair "bring a depth of experience that will enable OpenAI to scale our operations, set a strategy for the next phase of growth, and ensure that our teams have the resources they need to continue to thrive."[1]
Weil earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard, graduating summa cum laude with a concentration in physics and mathematics. He went on to graduate study in high-energy (particle) physics at Stanford, earning a master's degree. By his own later account he completed roughly two thirds of a doctoral program before leaving academia for the technology industry, a background he has cited as part of what drew him back toward scientific research late in his career.[5][8] Early in his working life he held software engineering and data science positions at companies and laboratories including Cooliris, Tropos Networks, Microsoft Research, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).[5]
Weil was one of Twitter's earliest employees, joining among its first several dozen staff and rising over more than six years to Senior Vice President of Product. In that role he led consumer, developer, and monetization products and sat on the leadership team through the company's 2013 initial public offering. He has described helping Twitter scale from roughly 40 to 4,000 employees, from no revenue to about 2 billion dollars in annual revenue, and to more than 300 million users.[1][3][5]
In 2016 Weil moved to Instagram, then owned by Facebook, as Vice President of Product. He led the platform's product and analytics teams, overseeing consumer and revenue products during a period in which Instagram grew from about 400 million to more than 1 billion users.[1][3] In February 2017, while serving as Instagram's head of product, he joined the board of directors of the fitness-tracking company Strava, a seat he held for more than seven years before stepping down in early 2024.[16]
In 2018 Weil joined the Facebook executive David Marcus to help start the company's blockchain and digital-payments effort. He was a co-creator, alongside Marcus and Morgan Beller, of the Libra cryptocurrency, later renamed Diem, and served as Vice President of Product for the associated digital wallet, Calibra, which was subsequently renamed Novi. The project, formally announced in June 2019, aimed to build a global payments network but drew intense regulatory scrutiny and was eventually wound down.[1][4]
In April 2021 Weil left Facebook to become President of Product and Business at Planet Labs, the San Francisco satellite-imaging company. There he was responsible for the company's go-to-market strategy, bringing together its product, software engineering, sales, and marketing organizations as the firm scaled its Earth-observation business.[3][4]
The table below summarizes Weil's principal roles.
| Years | Role | Organization |
|---|---|---|
| c. 2009-2016 | Early employee to SVP of Product | |
| 2016-2018 | VP of Product | |
| 2018-2021 | VP of Product (Novi); co-creator of Libra/Diem | |
| 2021-2024 | President, Product and Business | Planet Labs |
| 2024-2025 | Chief Product Officer | OpenAI |
| 2025-2026 | VP, OpenAI for Science | OpenAI |
Weil joined OpenAI as Chief Product Officer in June 2024, announced on June 10 in the same statement that introduced Sarah Friar as Chief Financial Officer.[1][2] He led the product organization responsible for translating OpenAI's research into products for consumers, developers, and businesses, spanning ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, and the company's enterprise offerings.[1]
His tenure as CPO coincided with OpenAI's pivot toward reasoning and agentic systems. During this period the product organization shipped the o-series of reasoning models, search inside ChatGPT, and early agent products, and Weil spoke publicly about the design challenges of building interfaces for models that pause to "think" before answering. In interviews he framed his job as raising the collective capability of users and described OpenAI's systems as ensembles of specialized models working together rather than a single general-purpose model.[5]
In the summer of 2025 OpenAI restructured its product leadership. Fidji Simo, the former chief executive of Instacart, joined in August 2025 as CEO of Applications with responsibility for the company's public-facing products; Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, and Weil's former product team began reporting to her. In early September 2025 Weil announced that he would step down as CPO to start a new research effort inside the company, and he began working alongside OpenAI's synthetic data team to deepen his grounding in AI research methods.[6][7]
The initiative Weil started was formally announced as OpenAI for Science in October 2025, with Weil as Vice President of AI for Science. He described its goal as building "the next great scientific instrument: an AI-powered platform that accelerates scientific discovery," with early focus areas spanning physics, biology, and chemistry. Weil said he planned to recruit a small team of world-class academics who were both fluent in AI and skilled science communicators, and he predicted that "2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineering."[6][8][9] Describing the unit's research culture, he told MIT Technology Review, "When I'm doing research, if I'm bouncing ideas off a colleague, I'm wrong 90% of the time and that's kind of the point."[8]
In October 2025 Weil drew sharp criticism after posting, then deleting, a message on X claiming that GPT-5 had "found solutions to 10 previously unsolved Erdos problems and made progress on 11 others." Thomas Bloom, the mathematician who maintains the Erdos Problems website, called the claim a dramatic misrepresentation, explaining that the problems were listed as "open" only because he was personally unaware of existing solutions; GPT-5 had located previously published references rather than producing new mathematics. The episode was widely cited as an example of overstated AI claims, with Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis calling it "embarrassing."[10]
On January 27, 2026, OpenAI for Science released Prism, a free AI workspace for scientists built around a LaTeX-based text editor that integrated OpenAI's GPT-5.2 model. Prism was designed to help researchers draft papers, generate citations and diagrams, sketch ideas, and collaborate with co-authors in real time, and OpenAI built it in part on technology from Crixet, a cloud LaTeX platform it had acquired in late 2025. The launch drew a mixed reception from academics, some of whom worried it would accelerate the flood of low-quality, AI-generated papers into scientific journals.[8][9]
On April 16, 2026, the team released GPT-Rosalind, described by OpenAI as its first domain-specific model and named after the chemist Rosalind Franklin. Aimed at biochemistry, genomics, and protein engineering, it was a reasoning model that could plan and orchestrate scientific workflows, including by calling external tools such as the protein-structure predictor AlphaFold 3. Access was gated behind a vetted trusted-access program whose early partners included Amgen, Moderna, Thermo Fisher Scientific, the Allen Institute, and Dyno Therapeutics.[11]
One day later, on Friday, April 17, 2026, Weil announced that it was his last day at OpenAI and that OpenAI for Science was "being decentralized into other research teams." In his statement on X he called the experience "a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science," and added that "accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI."[13] His exit came the same day as two other senior departures: Bill Peebles, who had led the Sora video team, and Srinivas Narayanan, an executive in OpenAI's enterprise applications group who cited family priorities. Commentators framed the simultaneous exits as part of a broader strategic shift in which OpenAI pared back consumer-facing "side quests" to concentrate on enterprise products and core research ahead of a possible public offering.[12][14]
Outside his operating jobs, Weil has held several board and public-service positions. He joined the board of directors of Cisco in May 2025 and serves on the board of The Nature Conservancy, and he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier he spent more than seven years (2017 to 2024) on the board of the fitness app Strava. He is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army Reserve.[3][15][16] As of his April 2026 departure from OpenAI, Weil had not publicly announced his next venture, describing himself on LinkedIn only as "thinking about new things."[13]