In case OpenAI’s structure couldn’t get any weirder—a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that’s become a public benefit corporation—it now has two CEOs. There’s Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there’s Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else.
Simo hasn’t been seen much at OpenAI’s San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company—not least because she’s heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. So for now, she’s working from home in Los Angeles, and she’s on Slack. A lot.
“Being present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within five minutes, people feel like I’m there and that they can reach me immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes,” she tells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI’s famously Slack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires. But not, apparently, for Simo. Employees say she is often seen popping into channels and threads, sharing thoughts and asking questions.
Simo joined during a chaotic period for OpenAI, which is expanding in nearly every direction. There are sovereign AI partnerships, new model releases, retail partnerships, multibillion-dollar compute deals, a proprietary chip, a mysterious hardware product—and of course, ChatGPT. “We do not battle for scope,” Simo says. “We battle for less scope.”
Outside Silicon Valley, Simo’s hiring came as a surprise. For those in the know, it was less of a shock. A native of Sète, a small fishing town in the south of France, Simo made a name for herself running the Facebook app at Meta before taking the top job at Instacart in 2021. She took the grocery startup public two years later. In the Valley, she’s known as a product visionary with a reputation for scaling consumer apps across the globe.
Simo’s role at OpenAI is, in large part, to do the same—turn the company’s research breakthroughs into moneymaking, must-have consumer products. She faces staggering competition from tech giants like Google and Meta, as well as AI startups founded by OpenAI alums, including Thinking Machines Lab, Anthropic, and Periodic Labs. “The thing that keeps me up at night is that the intelligence of our models is well ahead of how much people are using them,” Simo says. “I see my job as closing this gap.”
Since she arrived, Simo has overseen the launch of Pulse, a product that connects to users’ calendars and gives them personalized information based on their schedule, chat history, and feedback; created a jobs platform to allow people to get AI-certified and look for roles that make use of their skills; and doubled down on improving ChatGPT’s responses to people having acute mental health crises. Eventually, sources say, she’ll be the person deciding how to roll out ads in ChatGPT’s free tier.
