Berber Jin and Anissa Gardizy, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s No. 2 executive, plans to step down from her
full-time role after an extended medical leave. She communicated
her decision in a note to staff Thursday, saying that her medical
condition had worsened and her road to recovery would be much
longer than anticipated. She will become a part-time adviser to
the company. […]The company abruptly pivoted its focus to building AI-powered
coding tools for businesses after falling behind Anthropic in that
lucrative market. Simo led early efforts to create a
coding-focused “superapp,” which OpenAI launched today, and cut
side projects such as the video-generator app Sora.
Quoting from the Ronan Farrow / Andrew Mantz blockbuster New Yorker profile of Sam Altman back in April:
Several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing
reservations about Altman’s leadership and floated Fidji Simo, who
was formerly the C.E.O. of Instacart and now serves as OpenAI’s
C.E.O. for AGI Deployment, as a successor. Simo herself has
privately said that she believes Altman may eventually step down,
a person briefed on a recent discussion told us. (Simo disputes
this. Instacart recently reached a settlement with the F.T.C., in
which it admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay a
sixty-million-dollar fine for alleged deceptive practices under
Simo’s leadership.)
This whole dumb “superapp” idea that leaked last week sounds
exactly like the sort of thing someone who ran the Facebook app
would think is a good idea. The difference, I expect, is that
Facebook is free to let product quality (and experience quality)
fall by the wayside because their social platforms have such
powerful network effects. People stay on Facebook and Instagram
even as the experiences worsen because everyone they know is also
still on those apps. There’s no network effect like that for
ChatGPT. Claude is already rising to near-equal status in
popularity, and Gemini isn’t far behind, and Simo hasn’t even
started enshittifying ChatGPT yet. People will just switch.
