SAN FRANCISCO – Top Silicon Valley executive Fidji Simo announced she is leaving her full-time role at OpenAI to go part-time as an advisor and focus on recovery from a chronic illness.<\/p>\n
Simo, who joined the ChatGPT-maker in mid-2025 as CEO of Applications and became one of chief executive Sam Altman’s top lieutenants, said in a post on X that three months of medical leave had made clear her recovery would take far longer and be more complex than expected.<\/p>\n
“I am only making this decision now because I failed to make it many times before,” she wrote, revealing that over seven years of illness, she had repeatedly ignored advice to slow down.<\/p>\n
The 40-year-old French-American executive had been on medical leave since April due to a severe flare-up of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), a neuroimmune condition she has lived with since 2019.<\/p>\n
Her departure is the latest in a string of senior leadership changes at OpenAI, which has weathered significant executive turnover in recent years and has filed for a high-stakes IPO.<\/p>\n
Simo said that what propelled her career — from a fishing family in the Mediterranean port of Sete to the top ranks of Silicon Valley — also made stepping back extraordinarily difficult.<\/p>\n
“I grew up believing that opportunities were precious and that when they appeared, you grabbed them with both hands,” she wrote.<\/p>\n
“OpenAI in particular felt like a role that my entire career had been building toward.”<\/p>\n
Prior to her leadership role at OpenAI, Simo steered grocery delivery platform Instacart to profitability after joining as CEO in 2021. Before that she spent a decade at Meta, where she championed the company’s pivot to video.<\/p>\n
Despite leaving her full-time position, Simo signalled she remains deeply invested in AI’s potential to transform healthcare. She said she would continue contributing to OpenAI as an advisor.<\/p>\n
“I am really sad about this and very grateful for all Fidji has done for OpenAI, and even grateful for her friendship and who she is as a person,” Altman wrote on X.<\/p>\n
“We all wish her the best for a speedy recovery. This sucks.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN FRANCISCO – Top Silicon Valley executive Fidji Simo announced she is leaving her full-time role at OpenAI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":534574,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-534573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534573\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/534574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}