OpenAI announced that it is hiring Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to oversee its product offerings and business operations.
Simo, who told Instacart staff that she would have the title CEO of Applications at OpenAI, will report directly to OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman. Altman said in a message to employees that OpenAI shared on its website that he will “continue to directly oversee success” across the three core areas of OpenAI’s operations, which include its products, research activities, and build-out of computing infrastructure to support those first two areas.
Altman said that Simo, who has been serving on the board of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI for the past year, will be in charge of its new Applications division that combines two existing groups within OpenAI that build and market its products and support its commercial operations.
Simo is expected to remain at Instacart for “a few months” while its board finds a successor, according to Altman’s message to OpenAI employees. A veteran executive at Meta prior to becoming CEO of the delivery app, Simo oversaw Instacart’s initial public stock offering in 2023 and has led a major push to expand its advertising revenue. The company’s stock has risen 52% since the IPO, surpassing the Nasdaq’s 30% increase over the period.
It’s unclear how OpenAI’s investors will react to the move, which comes just days after OpenAI said it would abandon efforts to have its nonprofit board no longer control the for-profit arm of the company.
While Simo is highly respected in the tech industry, her hiring may raise questions about Altman’s focus and perhaps even how long he will remain at the helm of the company.
Many OpenAI backers, including Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner and Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, have said that their decision to put billions of dollars into the fast-growing AI startup was driven as much by their admiration for Altman’s vision and ambition as it was by the company’s technological prowess.
When OpenAI’s nonprofit board ousted Altman as CEO in late November 2023, investors including Kushner and Microsoft, which has put at least $13 billion into OpenAI to date, rallied around Altman, making it clear that their bet on the company was predicated on Altman remaining in charge and were cheered when threats of mass employee defections from OpenAI forced the nonprofit to rehire Altman just days later.
Tech publication The Information, which was the first to report the news of Simo’s hiring, cited unnamed sources who had spoken with Altman about his recent hiring decisions, and claimed that Altman has told people he is not interested in continuing to run all of OpenAI for much longer.
In his message to employees announcing Simo’s hiring, Altman noted that creating OpenAI’s products and building out the massive amounts of data center infrastructure the company needs to support the creation and distribution of those products each “could be its own large company.”
Altman said that with Simo focusing on the Applications division, he will be focused on supervising the company’s research division, its safety teams, which work to ensure the AI models the company is creating don’t pose significant risks to society, and the work expanding the company’s access to computer resources.
The company earlier this week announced a project to help countries around the world build out massive data centers with AI chips. That effort mirrors Project Stargate, a joint venture between OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi-based investment fund MGX that plans to spend $500 billion building out data center capacity in the U.S. by 2029.
Altman has also had to spend considerable time raising additional funds for OpenAI. In a recent blog post, Altman said it might take “trillions of dollars” for the company to fulfil its mission of building AGI, which it defines as AI systems that are at least as capable at most economically-valuable cognitive tasks as human experts, and seeing that the benefits of such powerful AI are widely distributed.
The OpenAI cofounder also has a wide range of investment interests outside of OpenAI, including backing startups working on nuclear power to cryptocurrency company World (formerly Worldcoin).
Simo said in a memo to Instacart employees that she has “a passion for AI and in particular the potential it has to cure diseases” and that “the ability to lead such an important part of our collective future was a hard opportunity to pass up.”
OpenAI, unlike competitors Google DeepMind and Meta, does not currently have efforts aimed at building tools specifically to help scientists with biological or medical research. That said, the company’s latest o1 and o3 “reasoning” models may have scientific applications, and the company has been demonstrating those products for scientists at Sandia National Laboratories.
