The Silicon Valley CEO tasked with getting OpenAI to turn a profit

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's newest senior hire, and CEO Sam Altman bonded over a mutual fixation: They hate standing meetings and love to kill them in the name of efficiency.

- Berber Jin & Keach Hagey

Simo will need that waste-no-time ethos in her new role helping OpenAI prepare to go public in the coming years. In her newly created role of CEO of applications, she is charged with helping the ChatGPT maker become a profitable global business, while remaking an internal culture that has been mired in executive infighting and high-profile departures.

Altman needs Simo—an established operations and turnaround guru at Instacart, where she is currently CEO—more than ever. During a recent all-hands meeting, he suggested that when the company goes public, he would like Simo, not him, to be the one leading the earnings calls.

In her newly created role, Simo, who joins this summer, will oversee all of the company's major business functions, including its product, finance, and sales teams, reporting to Altman. She represents a new generation of OpenAI leadership.

The startup and runaway leader in generative artificial intelligence has increased its head count more than fivefold since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. Traffic to the chatbot has grown more than threefold to 5.1 billion monthly visits in the past year, according to Similarweb.

It is also bleeding cash. OpenAI told investors last fall that it won't generate a profit until 2029, and it expects to lose $44 billion before doing so, a person familiar with the matter said. Longer term, Altman wants OpenAI to build AI-powered robots and personal devices, and operate a global network of data centers to build and run its AI models.