Fidji Simo

CEO of Applications — OpenAI

Profile

Fidji Simo is OpenAI’s first CEO of Applications — a role created specifically for her in May 2025 and started that August. She reports directly to Sam Altman and owns almost everything that isn’t raw research or infrastructure: product, business, engineering, operations, the go-to-market layer of ChatGPT. If Altman’s job is to build the model, Simo’s job is to turn it into a business that reaches billions of people without breaking them.

Her résumé is unusually product-heavy for an AI executive. She grew up in Sète, a small fishing town in the south of France, and was the first in her family to finish high school before making it to HEC Paris and UCLA Anderson. She spent four years at eBay, then a decade at Facebook (2011-2021), where she ran the video product, the News Feed app, and eventually the flagship Facebook app itself — the consumer surface that a billion-plus people opened every day. From 2021 to 2025 she was CEO of Instacart, taking it public in 2023 and pivoting it from a pandemic delivery app into an ads-and-data business.

Why this matters to anyone building with AI: Simo is the person deciding what ChatGPT is as a product. Under her watch, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Health, introduced advertising into ChatGPT, acquired the tech show TBPN, and shipped parental controls and age-prediction work for teen accounts. She’s been publicly candid that she thinks Meta “didn’t anticipate the risks” its products created in society, and has framed her first big task at OpenAI as addressing mental-health harms surfacing in ChatGPT usage data. That’s a very different posture from the growth-first consumer-tech template she came up in.

She’s also the founder and president of the Complex Disorders Association (formerly the Metrodora Foundation), a nonprofit funding research into neuroimmune disorders — an interest that is personal: she lives with POTS, the same condition that led her to take medical leave from OpenAI in April 2026. For developers, the thing to watch is how the consumer application layer of the frontier AI company is being shaped — the distribution and product instincts of a Facebook/Instacart operator, not a researcher.