Fidji Simo, chief executive officer of Instacart Inc., speaks during a Bloomberg Studio 1.0 interview in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, March 3, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s product and business chief, on Thursday announced she is stepping down from her role at the artificial intelligence company to focus on recovery after a “severe exacerbation of a chronic illness.”
Simo was diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, or POTS, in 2019, and said she’s been spending “countless hours in doctors’ offices, dealing with symptoms, treatments, insurance, uncertainty, and all the invisible work that comes with being a patient.”
She stepped away from OpenAI in April for a medical leave. OpenAI President Greg Brockman took over product responsibilities in Simo’s absence.
“When I went on leave, many people told me I was courageous for prioritizing my health,” Simo wrote in a post on X on Thursday. “The truth is that I am only making this decision now because I failed to make it many times before.”
Simo said she will transition into a role as a part-time advisor at OpenAI.
OpenAI hired Simo in May of 2025 to lead the company’s applications business. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a memo at the time that Simo would “focus on enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale as we enter a next phase of growth.”
Last month OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO, a week after rival Anthropic did the same. However, the company hasn’t offered a timeline for a public market debut and is reportedly putting off those plans until at least next year.
Simo previously served as CEO of Instacart, where she took the company public and helped to break the longest tech IPO drought in three decades. She also spent more than a decade in leadership roles at Meta, acting as the head of Facebook from 2019 until 2021.
“Two years after I got sick, Facebook offered me the opportunity to take a full year of medical leave. I didn’t even pause to consider it. I immediately said no,” Simo wrote on Thursday. She added that CEO Mark Zuckerberg “told me I should play the long game. I wish I had listened.”
Altman said in a post on X that he’s grateful for Simo’s contributions to the company, “and even grateful for her friendship and who she is as a person.”
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