Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 Executive, to Step Down to Focus on Recovery From Chronic Illness

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of artificial general intelligence deployment and the company’s No. 2 executive, will step down from her full-time role following a three-month medical leave, she said in a note on X on Thursday.

“Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness I’ve lived with for seven years,” she wrote on X. “During that time, it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated — and that I needed to focus on it fully.”

Simo will transition to a part-time role within the company, and she said she believes the best use of AI is to help cure diseases. She thanked CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman and the company’s board for supporting her throughout the leave, which started in April.

“I love building,” she wrote. “My work has always given me a deep sense of purpose. OpenAI in particular felt like a role that my entire career had been building toward, which made this decision even harder. But what I’m learning now is that grit and endurance are not the only skills required to have impact over decades. Sometimes the harder thing is to stop, listen, and trust that taking care of yourself today makes it possible to contribute for much longer tomorrow.”

In his own X post, Altman said he was “really sad about this” and was “very grateful for all fidji has done for openai” and “for her friendship and who she is as a person.”

“We all wish her the best for a speedy recovery,” he wrote. “This sucks.”

Simo’s surprise leave in April, one spurred by a neuroimmune condition, precipitated a wave of corporate departures from and reshufflings within the ChatGPT creator just as it prepared to make its public debut. Just as Simo announced her leave, chief marketing officer Kate Roach also left her role to recover from cancer, while chief operating officer Brad Lightcap stepped down from his title to focus on “special projects.”

Simo’s tenure at OpenAI included spearheading the purchase of the tech podcast TBPN and instilling a sense of focus within the company, telling employees during an all-hands meeting once that the company “cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” according to a Business Insider profile of her in March.

Before her time at OpenAI, where she previously served as CEO of Applications, Simo was the CEO of the personal-shopping app Instacart and served as the head of Facebook for Meta. She wrote in her Thursday X post that, two years after she got sick, Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered her the opportunity to take a year off. “I immediately said no,” Simo wrote. “At the time, Zuck told me I should play the long game. I wish I had listened.”

“More than ever, I believe that some of the most important opportunities for AI lie in helping people solve real problems in their daily lives: their health, their finances, their time and the everyday burdens that shape human experience,” she wrote, later adding, “For now, my focus is recovery. But my belief in the potential of technology to solve deeply human problems has never been stronger.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported Simo’s exit.