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.
