The power shift inside OpenAI

Fidji Simo is wrapping up her first week at OpenAI, where she is expected to oversee most of the company’s roughly 3,000 employees.

To investors and partners, OpenAI leaders have been describing the former Instacart CEO as the kind of steady hand the company needs. Her mandate is clear: turn a chaotic, unprofitable startup into a disciplined, publicly traded tech giant. On paper, she seems well-suited. She lived through Facebook’s hyper-growth era in the early 2010s, helped take Instacart public, and knows the advertising industry inside and out — experience that will be valuable once ads arrive in ChatGPT.

Simo’s arrival also underscores a bigger shift inside OpenAI. It’s becoming increasingly clear that CEO Sam Altman doesn’t want the responsibilities of running the next Big Tech company. He appears more focused on raising trillions of dollars for massive compute projects and incubating a brain-computer-interface startup than managing day-to-day operations. At the dinner I attended with him last week, he lit up while describing a “new kind of financial instrument” to bankroll OpenAI’s data center ambitions.

When I asked if he imagined OpenAI eventually resembling Alphabet, where search profits bankroll a constellation of experimental bets, he didn’t hesitate about the need for another leader. “We have a big consumer tech company. We have this mega-scale infrastructure project for humanity. We have a research lab. And then we have all of the new stuff—the robots, the devices, the BCI, the crazy ideas. I can’t run four companies. It’s an open question if I can run one, but I certainly can’t run four.”

For now, Altman will remain directly involved in OpenAI’s compute, research, and consumer hardware efforts with Jony Ive. The new BCI startup he’s co-founding with Worldcoin CEO Alex Blania will sit entirely outside of OpenAI. Inside the company, his direct reports are expected to be president Greg Brockman (who oversees scaling efforts like Stargate), chief research officer Mark Chen, chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, consumer hardware VP Peter Welinder, and head of safety Johannes Heidecke.

Simo, meanwhile, will inherit responsibility for what Altman calls the “big consumer tech” part of OpenAI. Although reporting lines haven’t been finalized, she’s expected to oversee COO Brad Lightcap, CFO Sarah Friar, CPO Kevin Weil, software engineering chief Srinivas Narayanan, and the leaders of marketing, policy, legal, and HR.

It won’t be an easy team to manage. Several of these executives are already closely aligned with Altman (Lightcap) or have been CEOs themselves (Weil and Friar). On top of that, Simo will need to replace chief people officer Julia Villagra, who was promoted only in March but announced this week that she’s leaving to pursue using “art, music, and storytelling to help people better understand the transition to AGI.”

Simo’s official title—CEO of Applications—is revealing. Today, OpenAI has only one app: ChatGPT. The next is likely to be a browser, while the first monetization effort under her watch will probably be affiliate links inside ChatGPT’s shopping results, which could launch as soon as this fall.

Beyond a Slack message introducing herself to employees and a blog post last month brimming with AGI-era optimism, Simo hasn’t laid out a public vision for ChatGPT or OpenAI’s consumer strategy. It’s only week one, and she’s still meeting with teams and getting up to speed. But given the velocity at which OpenAI moves, it won’t be long before we hear more from her.

“Far more AI talent has come into Google and Google DeepMind than has left, especially amongst our top competitors.” – Google VP John Casey during an employee all-hands meeting.

“I would say the number of people who I would trust with a giant dollar amount of compute to go do that is probably sub-150.” Amazon’s head of AGI research, David Luan, on the market size for top AI talent in a conversation with me on Decoder.

Elon Musk approached Mark Zuckerberg “about potential financing arrangements or investments” for his proposed takeover of OpenAI earlier this year. – OpenAI’s lawyers in a court brief. Huh?

Interesting career moves this week:

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