OpenAI applications chief Fidji Simo steps down after 3-month leave

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief of applications and the company's No. 2 executive, is stepping down after a three-month medical leave, adding to a string of leadership changes at the ChatGPT maker.

"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," Simo wrote on X on Thursday. "During that time, it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated."

Simo, 40, has postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a neuroimmune condition she has managed since 2019. She will transition to a part-time advisory role. Before joining OpenAI in mid-2025 as CEO of Applications, she led Instacart to profitability after taking over as chief executive in 2021 and spent a decade at Meta, where she championed the company's pivot to video.

Her departure comes as OpenAI, which has filed for a high-stakes IPO, navigates a period of intense competition for AI talent. The company has lost senior researchers to rivals including Anthropic, while Google has seen its own researchers depart for OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months, per Business Insider and Search Engine Journal reports.

Simo's exit follows a broader reorganization at OpenAI. In recent months, she told her team to cut back on "side quests," a directive that led to the shutdown of the AI video-generation tool Sora and the sunsetting of Atlas, the AI-powered browser OpenAI launched in October. The company is folding Atlas' agentic browsing features into ChatGPT's desktop app and a new Google Chrome extension, directly competing with Google's Gemini Side Panel.

"I am really sad about this and very grateful for all Fidji has done for OpenAI," Chief Executive Sam Altman wrote on X. "We all wish her the best for a speedy recovery."

Simo's transition adds to a pattern of senior turnover at OpenAI that investors will weigh ahead of the company's IPO. The company's ability to retain top product and research talent is a key factor in its competitive positioning against Google, which lost senior researchers Noam Shazeer and John Jumper to OpenAI and Anthropic in June, and Anthropic, which has been aggressively hiring. OpenAI's equity compensation structure — which a former Google account executive described to Business Insider as being "in a different universe" from Big Tech packages — has been a retention tool, but the departure of a top lieutenant signals that even generous equity may not be enough to prevent leadership churn.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.