In case OpenAI\u2019s structure couldn\u2019t get any weirder\u2014a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that\u2019s become a public benefit corporation\u2014it now has two CEOs. There\u2019s Sam Altman, chief executive of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there\u2019s Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else.<\/p>\n
Simo hasn\u2019t been seen much at OpenAI\u2019s San Francisco office since she began as CEO of Applications in August. But her presence is felt at every level of the company\u2014not least because she\u2019s heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI<\/a> 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\u2019s working from home in Los Angeles, and she\u2019s on Slack. A lot.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing present from 8 am to midnight every day, responding within five minutes, people feel like I\u2019m there and that they can reach me immediately, that I jump on the phone within five minutes,\u201d she tells me. Employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Simo joined during a chaotic period for OpenAI, which is expanding in nearly every direction. There are sovereign AI<\/a> partnerships, new model releases, retail partnerships, multibillion-dollar compute deals<\/a>, a proprietary chip, a mysterious hardware product\u2014and of course, ChatGPT. \u201cWe do not battle for scope,\u201d Simo says. \u201cWe battle for less scope.\u201d<\/p>\n Outside Silicon Valley, Simo\u2019s hiring came as a surprise. For those in the know, it was less of a shock. A native of S\u00e8te, 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\u2019s known as a product visionary with a reputation for scaling consumer apps across the globe.<\/p>\n Simo\u2019s role at OpenAI is, in large part, to do the same\u2014turn the company\u2019s 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. \u201cThe thing that keeps me up at night is that the intelligence of our models is well ahead of how much people are using them,\u201d Simo says. \u201cI see my job as closing this gap.\u201d<\/p>\n Since she arrived, Simo has overseen the launch of Pulse, a product that connects to users\u2019 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\u2019s responses to people having acute mental health crises<\/a>. Eventually, sources say, she\u2019ll be the person deciding how to roll out ads in ChatGPT\u2019s free tier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In case OpenAI\u2019s structure couldn\u2019t get any weirder\u2014a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that\u2019s become a public…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,9889,1921,1371,5236,1906,874,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-267838","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-big-interview","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-longreads","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-openai","17":"tag-technology","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}