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.