OpenAI’s business is spreading into many areas, and the executive running product and consumer-facing work has a clear mandate: turn ChatGPT into something people rely on and that pays the bills.
The company’s corporate structure already reads like a riddle — a nonprofit that oversees a for-profit, which has become a public benefit corporation. There are two leaders at the top. Sam Altman runs the organization’s research and compute efforts. Since August, Fidji Simo has held the title of CEO of Applications and leads the remainder of the company’s product portfolio and commercial strategy.
Simo rarely appears at OpenAI’s San Francisco campus since taking the role. She has been coping with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a condition that makes standing for extended periods risky. Her base is in Los Angeles. She spends long stretches online, dropping into Slack channels, answering messages and joining calls. The effect on colleagues, she says, is unmistakable. “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. Coworkers confirm that impression: Simo is a frequent presence in threads, asking questions and offering direction at a pace that many new hires find startling.
Her remit is vast. She oversees ChatGPT and most of the company’s teams that touch customers or revenue. Simo’s arrival came at a notably frenetic moment for OpenAI: partnerships with governments, successive new model releases, retail tie-ups, massive compute agreements, a proprietary chip program, and a secretive hardware effort. “We do not battle for scope,” Simo says. “We battle for less scope.”
That bluntness fits her reputation in the tech world. Born in Sète, a fishing town on France’s Mediterranean coast, Simo rose through product ranks at Facebook under Meta and took charge at Instacart in 2021. She steered Instacart through an IPO two years later. In Silicon Valley circles she is known as a product leader who scales consumer services globally.
Her assignment at OpenAI is straightforward in description: turn the lab’s breakthroughs into mainstream products that generate money and stick in people’s routines. She faces intense rivals, from Google and Meta to startups founded by former OpenAI staff, such as 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, a handful of new moves have landed under her leadership. OpenAI launched Pulse, a feature that links to a user’s calendar and presents personalized data based on schedule, past chats and feedback. The company built a jobs offering intended to certify people for AI-ready roles and connect them with employers. Teams have focused on how ChatGPT should respond to users in acute mental-health distress. People familiar with internal planning say Simo will ultimately have a major say in whether and how advertising appears in ChatGPT’s free tier.
We spoke in Simo’s light-filled farmhouse. Her husband, Rémy, who left engineering to make desserts full time, had put out pastries and a box of his chocolates on the table. Their daughter, who is 10, plays a quiet, visible role in the conversation; Simo mentions her often as an example of how children take to creative tools.
The exchange below has been edited for length and clarity.
Zoë Schiffer: You’re the CEO of Applications, and you report to Sam Altman. How does that partnership work day to day?
Fidji Simo: “What Sam wanted was the ability to focus on research and compute, so I am trying to make sure that he can free up his time. Meanwhile, he realized that this is a company that evolved primarily from a research lab but became a really important product company, and that requires a different muscle. I see my role as making that product company incredibly successful and making sure we respect the culture of the research lab.”
Did someone check your references before you took this job?
[ Laughs. ] “I think Sam had gotten references on me for like three years. Sam and I worked in the same circle, so he knew about my reputation. I don’t think he literally picked up the phone and was like, ‘Is she legit?’”
Was Mark Zuckerberg one of those references?
“Mark has been an incredible supporter throughout my career and has provided references many times. In this particular situation, I don’t think Sam called him.”
You’ve been known to take risks in past roles. Are there risks at OpenAI you want to push?
“Well, taking the job felt pretty risky to me,” she says with a laugh. “I would say the thing that I don’t think we did well at Meta is anticipating the risks that our products would create in society.”
“At OpenAI, these risks are very real. Mental health and jobs were my first two initiatives when I came into the company. I was looking at the landscape and thinking, ‘Yep, immediately, mental health is something that we need to address. Jobs are clearly going to face some disruption, and we have a role to play to help minimize that disruption.’”
“That’s not going to be easy, as the path is uncharted. So it is a very big responsibility, but it’s one that I feel like we have both the culture and the prioritization to address up-front.”
How is OpenAI doing on the mental-health front?
“Just in the span of the last few months, we have massively reduced the prevalence of negative mental health responses. We have launched parental controls with leading protections. We are working on age prediction to protect teens.”
She stresses scale as a complicating factor. “At the same time, when you have 800 million people [per week], and when we consider the prevalence of mental health illnesses in our society, of course people are going to turn to ChatGPT during acute distress moments. Doing the right thing every single time is exceptionally hard. We’re trying to catch as many problematic behaviors as we can and constantly refine our models.”
If you had to grade current performance against your target, where would you put the company?
“It’s not as if we’re ever going to reach a point where we’re done. Every week, new behaviors emerge tied to features we launch, and teams say, ‘Oh, that’s another safety challenge to address.’ A clear example is mania. You read a transcript and someone might write, ‘I feel super great. I haven’t slept in two days, and I feel on top of the world.’ A clinical psychologist would see that as not normal — that’s mania. But on the surface, the words can read fine. We work with psychologists to detect signals that point to mania and to build a response strategy to intervene.”
She adds that false positives are a real problem. “Getting it wrong is really annoying. If you’re a normal adult who’s excited and ChatGPT tells you, ‘Hey, you might be having a manic episode,’ that’s not great. This is a very subtle area, and we’re trying to handle it with as much care and outside input as possible.”
OpenAI is one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world. It is also losing billions of dollars annually. How do you see it moving toward profit?
“It all comes back to market size and the value we provide within each market,” Simo says. “Historically, a wealthy few had access to a team of helpers. With ChatGPT we could give everyone that team — a personal shopper, a travel agent, a financial adviser, a health coach. That is highly valuable, and we have barely scratched the surface. If we build that experience, I expect many people will pay for it, and revenue will follow.”
She points to enterprise as another revenue frontier. “On the enterprise side, we sell an API and ChatGPT Enterprise, which are great starting points. Those products are a thin layer compared to the possibilities. If you imagine building agents for every industry and function, there’s a huge amount to build, whether by us or by enabling third parties on our platform.”
“Put simply: the markets are massive and the depth of value is deep — that is the formula for monetization. The real wild card is whether we have the compute to deliver at scale.”
Compute has been one of OpenAI’s most visible expenditures. The company has signed deals worth many billions to secure GPU capacity and build data centers. Critics fret about the size and circular nature of some agreements, and about how much of the broader U.S. tech sector seems to hinge on OpenAI and Nvidia.
“So first off, a lot of people say, ‘Whoa, these compute deals are massive,’” Simo says. “But when you see how constrained we are internally and how much more we could do with more GPUs, it’s clear those decisions were right. We have a pipeline of products that will make heavy use of compute. I know these deals look risky from the outside, but inside the company, what would be riskier is not leaning into compute.”
She emphasizes that partners on those deals are sophisticated. “The companies we’re making these arrangements with are experienced partners that know our business well and can provide the financing and infrastructure we need.”
Pulse, which launched for Pro users, is a concrete example of a compute-hungry offering. “You take a product like Pulse. I want that to be available to everyone, yet compute constraints prevent that for now. I’m giving you one example, but there are many like it.”
How does she personally use Pulse?
“It’s really helpful at work and for health tracking,” she says. “On the health side, Pulse tells me each morning if a new study has appeared related to my condition. Previously I would have to hunt through journals. Now it’s summarized inline and clear.”
“For work, it’s similar. Keeping up with AI news is a challenge. Pulse gives me a fast summary of what happened in the AI world. My husband is a chocolate maker and he’s building an advent calendar. Pulse suggested, ‘Oh, you should hide a message in all of the different windows.’ He loved that idea.”
You’ve been open about your chronic illness. How do you manage such a demanding role while dealing with POTS?
“It’s a good question. I didn’t want my disease to get in the way of my mission. If you can give your all to a job, you can find accommodations that make the role possible. I’m incredibly lucky to have worked at supportive companies; that isn’t universal. Because so few senior leaders are public about chronic illness, many people assume it can’t be done. When I went public, I heard from a lot of people who said, ‘Oh my God, I realize there is a path.’”
She is frank about daily limits. “It’s not easy every day. I would prefer to do everything, but it comes down to determination and prioritization. In another sense, the constraints have made me more intentional as a leader, and they have heightened my interest in product ideas related to health care.”
Simo’s medical history traces back to a difficult pregnancy at Meta. She spent five months on bed rest and underwent surgery to avoid early delivery. “I started having contractions at month four,” she says. “I worked through it. My husband found photos from my 40th birthday of me holding a Zuck review in bed. It wasn’t cool to work from home then, yet I was presenting on Facebook Live. After that period I developed POTS. A 2019 surgery for endometriosis made it worse. Since 2019, I’ve had ups and downs, and that year was when things became very triggered.”
Her public disclosure of struggle is deliberate. “I care about everyone realizing their full potential. I want a world where health conditions don’t block that, either because we cure more conditions or because companies build accommodations and technologies that make life easier.”
OpenAI’s culture has been famously centered on in-person collaboration. How do you build trust if you can’t always be in the office?
“I was very upfront,” she says. “On day one, I sent a message to the company explaining my condition in detail. Invisible illnesses are tricky: people look at you and think you’re fine. I explained transparently: ‘I would love to be in the office as much as possible, and there will be days I can do that and days I must work reclined.’ That vulnerability created a lot of trust, though it was a risky thing to share when joining a new place. I agonized about it for a couple of weeks.”
She leans on presence through other channels. “The culture is in-person, yet it’s highly Slack-driven. I think I’m more accessible online than I might be if I were running around the office. I hope this relapse ends so I can be onsite more, but this approach has helped so far.”
Journalists have noticed her Slack activity.
[ Laughs. ] “If reporters know about that, I don’t know if that’s good,” she says.
Part of her brief at OpenAI is to figure out an advertising model for ChatGPT. What might ads look like, and when could they appear?
“Advertising works well when users have commerce intent,” she says. “We already see significant commerce intent in queries. Before any ad program, the commerce experience has to be excellent: people should be able to find and explore products and get great recommendations.”
When asked whether a shopping recommendation might be paid, she turns to the broader data challenge. “OpenAI holds very rich user data. It mixes work and personal interactions, habits and product needs. That information is enormously attractive to advertisers. Whatever we do has to treat that data with the utmost respect. That’s why we have not announced an ad plan. If we ever implement one, it would need to be a very different model from what’s common today.”
She leans on past lessons from ad platforms. “What people dislike about ads tends to be how data is used rather than the ads themselves.”
You’re managing a company that seems to be attempting many initiatives at once. Is overreach a concern?
“My role is to reduce that risk,” Simo answers. “You solve scope problems by hiring great talent. Instead of one person stretching across 15 projects, you hire the best leader for each project. I’m focused on recruiting and on making sure we have the capabilities to meet our ambitions.”
She insists that OpenAI intends to be fundamental to future software design. “We believe every category of software will be reimagined for AI, and we want to help ensure that products people rely on are AI-native from the ground up. Achieving that requires ambition and the right capabilities — which is what I’m building out.”
Sora, OpenAI’s video app, drew criticism for limited safety protections at launch. What was the thinking?
“I think it launched with a reasonable set of safety features,” she says. “We rolled out parental controls that let parents control how their child’s likeness is used, set usage hours, and manage access. The controls for adults to protect their likeness are thoughtful as well.”
She emphasizes that the medium is new. “It’s a new form of interaction, so we are learning and refining from feedback.”
Copyright holders have pushed the company in legal and public debates. What’s the company hearing from rights owners?
“What we’re hearing from copyright holders is a lot of excitement about this new media and how their IP can engage fans in new ways. They want the value exchange to be clear. We want that too.”
Some critics labeled early AI-generated video as low-quality imitation, or “AI slop.”
“I think every new medium goes through phases,” Simo says. “Cinema began as recordings of stage performances before filmmakers developed close-ups and montage. Right now, AI often copies human output and sometimes produces inferior versions. What interests me is when the medium moves into true experimentation that uses its unique affordances. We’re starting to see that. Sometimes a video is more of the same, and then suddenly one stops you and you think, ‘Who made that?’”
She worries about gatekeeping narratives. “I fear a paternalistic take that writes off new content as inherently poor. For many people this output is entertaining. I have a friend with a small business who uses ChatGPT for a business plan. It’s not Goldman Sachs, sure, but she would never access Goldman Sachs. What she gets from ChatGPT is far better than anything she had access to before. We should consider this medium as raising the floor of who can create.”
There’s a widespread debate about AI’s impact on work. What’s your view on job creation and displacement?
“I believe AI will create many jobs, yet some roles will be deeply disrupted,” she says. “That’s why one of my first initiatives was OpenAI certifications. We want to certify 10 million workers to be AI-ready and to build a jobs marketplace to connect them with employers. We’re doing our part, but governments and companies will have major roles to play too.”
What is the human edge as AI progresses?
“Human beings are endlessly creative. AI gives us superpowers to be more creative. The idea that humans will just tap out and be done doesn’t resonate with me.”
She points to her daughter as an example. “She goes from idea to finished product faster than I ever could. She’s started three businesses and she’s 10. She wrote a song and a book, because the tools make creation so easy.”
Does her daughter use ChatGPT?
“Oh, she definitely does. It’s not intended for under-13 users, yet under parental supervision I allow her to use ChatGPT.”
There’s also public concern about catastrophic AI risk. Does she share that worry?
“I wasn’t raised with that fear before I started digging into OpenAI,” she says. “That said, we are taking the actions we can to reduce those risks.”
Would she consider the top job running the entire company?
“Let’s be very clear: what Sam does, I cannot do,” Simo says. “There’s so much to do inside my scope that I think I have a decade or more of work to do right here. We need everyone. We need Sam. We need me.”
Around the farmhouse, it’s easy to picture the private life she invokes. The pastries are real. The box of Rémy’s chocolates sits open, and small family trinkets give the room a lived-in quality. The image contrasts with the monumental scale of the work Simo now manages: turning a research-heavy outfit into a product-first company that must answer to users, partners and regulators and, at some point, to a commercial plan that makes sense to investors and the public.
She says her top priorities are concentrating product scope, hiring leaders to own each major project and making demonstrable progress on mental-health safety and job transition programs. Those commitments sit beside broader bets on products such as Pulse and enterprise agents and the unresolved question of where advertising belongs in a tool that contains a wide spectrum of personal and professional data.
Simo’s path to the role was a reminder that product expertise remains highly prized. She brings experience taking consumer-facing software from experiment to scale. For the company, scaling is the immediate challenge. For Simo, it is the mission at the center of daily life: build tools that millions of people depend on and that generate sustainable revenue, all while managing the thorny safety and social questions those tools raise. The company’s future will be shaped by how she prioritizes projects and by whether the infrastructure and governance required for broad adoption can be put in place at the same pace as product launches.