Just now, OpenAl made a big move.CEO Sam Altman wrote that former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo will join OpenAI as CEO of Applications, while he himself will guard OpenAI’s core technology and long-term strategy.
The new CEO’s title sounds a bit long, but to put it simply: she will be fully responsible for OpenAI’s products, especially user-oriented application products such as ChatGPT.
At first glance you might think that the CEO has been changed, but that’s not the case.
Sam Altman is still the CEO of OpenAI, and Fidji Simo joined a newly created parallel position, responsible not for models and algorithms, but for “making AI products really easy to use and sellable.”
Shortly after Altman published the article, Fidji Simo also issued an internal letter to all Instacart employees. While reviewing the achievements during her tenure, she also stated that Instacart would not be “leaderless”. She would stay in office for a few weeks until the new CEO was in place, and would continue to serve as chairman of Instacart’s board of directors in the future to support the transition of the new CEO.
OpenAI invited Instacart’s CEO to helm its product business. This may seem gentle on the surface, but it is actually a decisive organizational structure upgrade. OpenAI is no longer satisfied with being a “model-first AI company”, they now want to become a “product-first platform company.”
Who is the new “app CEO”?
In the past few years, OpenAI has focused on model development. GPT-3 and GPT-4 have become more powerful than the previous generation, and their capabilities are already amazing. But after ChatGPT became popular, the team gradually discovered that users do not care about how many parameters your model has or how fast the calculation speed is. What they care more about is whether this AI can help me solve practical problems, whether it is easy to use, and whether it can be integrated into daily workflow.
No matter how advanced your model is, if your product is poorly made, users will still not use you. This is an iron rule that never changes in the technology industry.
At present, OpenAI’s product line has been fully rolled out, from ChatGPT to GPTs store, voice assistant to the enterprise market, which has long exceeded the scope of the technical team working alone. Now OpenAl urgently needs a strong operator who truly understands products, users commercialization, and can lead the team in battle.
At this time, Fidji Simo came.
It is worth mentioning that Fidji Simo is not an “airborne” executive, but a long-time board member of OpenAl. She is familiar with Sam Altman, which directly avoids the “newcomer” running-in time. Her transfer from a director position to an executive position can perhaps be seen as a combination of “internal promotion + external transfer.
In addition to being an old acquaintance of OpenAl, Fidji Simo’s resume is also very convincing:
In 2011, Fidji Simo joined Facebook and was gradually promoted to vice president of the company, responsible for the development and strategy of Facebook’s main application. She led the development of core features such as News Feed, Stories, Groups, Video Marketplace, Gaming, News, Dating and advertising, and promoted Facebook’s video business, including the launch of Facebook Live and Facebook Watch. She played a key role in promoting Facebook’s advertising business and mobile monetization.
She has personally witnessed Facebook’s growth cycle from a “social product” to a “global platform” and has practical experience in user growth, advertising, commercialization, and content distribution ecology. In other words, most of the content sorting, short video recommendations, and even the second-hand trading section that we see on Facebook every day are created by her team.
After working at Facebook for 10 years, Fidji Simo chose to leave and joined the Instacart board of directors. In August of the same year, she took over as CEO, becoming the first female CEO in the company’s history. Under her leadership, Instacart achieved profitability and successfully went public in September 2023. During this period, she also promoted cooperation with retailers and launched white-label e-commerce solutions to help retailers improve their online business.
In addition, she also founded Metrodora Institute, a health organization focusing on neuroimmune diseases. From this point of view, Fidji Simo not only understands technology products, but also has a natural concern for social issues and understands user needs better. This is exactly the scarce talent that OpenAl needs most in its current process of turning to product platformization.
What signals does this appointment send?
In the past few years, OpenAI has “amazed the audience” with its technology. But in the next five years, the main battlefield of the AI industry is likely to shift to “who can make AI the most smoothly” and make users more dependent on your products. This may be the source of long-term value.
Therefore, OpenAl is not going to “change leadership” this time, but to add a truly powerful “product heart” to the original technical system, and gradually transform it into a “product first, model escort” model.
Fidji Simo’s style is not traditional, as she clearly stated on LinkedIn:
“I will work hard to build a world of powerful, controllable, and expressive AI products. AI is the most profound technological turning point of our time.”
Her understanding of AI is not “rolling up parameters” but “letting everyone use it”, and it has a clear social value orientation – this is likely to make OpenAl’s future products more inclusive and warm.
The act of separating application services can perhaps be seen as part of a larger game:
In fact, OpenAl does not need to set up a new position of “CEO of Application Business”. Instead, Altman can continue to be in charge of the overall situation and hand over the execution to several vice presidents. It can still run smoothly.
But they chose to directly set up a parallel CEO position and let Fidji Simo be responsible for the application business, even independent of the research and technology lines.
This may indicate that OpenAI’s organizational thinking is changing. They have clearly realized that application products are another main channel, which must be run with a completely different logic.
Establishing an application business CEO not only supplements organizational capabilities, but also opens a new window for the entire business layout.
What is more noteworthy is that there are reports that OpenAl has recently been quietly incubating a “type X” social platform, and this project has now entered the internal prototype stage. The core functions are centered around image generation and information flow distribution. The goal is to create a new platform form that integrates generative AI and social content beyond traditional chat interactions.
In this potential new business direction, Fidji Simo’s work experience at Facebook is very valuable. She understands user growth, long-term product evolution, and how to establish strong connections between content and platforms.
Whether it is creating a social portal or expanding user content consumption scenarios, it is not a simple technical extension, but a complete reconstruction of product and user logic. The joining of Fidji Simo may be a foreshadowing of this key node in advance.
However, having the right people and positions in place does not mean that everything will go smoothly. Fidji Simo has to deal with an AI product with hundreds of millions of users around the world, evolving functional forms, business pressure across both the B-end and the C-end, and a brand that is becoming increasingly popular under the attention of the world.
Even though OpenAI is now the traffic overlord and ChatGPT is still a synonym for the industry, the pressure has already come.
According to the latest data from Similarweb, the number of visits to OpenAI’s official website reached 700 million in April 2025, up 25% from the previous month, but at the same time, Google’s Gemini grew by 37%, and Anthropic’s Claude grew even more dramatically, by 161%.
This also shows that ChatGPT does not have direct competitors in the Chatbot track, but this does not mean that this product form can always be “enshrined”. If OpenAl wants to keep its top spot, it cannot rely on a chatbot to make a living. It must speed up the pace of expanding its C-end product line and truly integrate AI into more specific and commonly used life and work scenarios.
All of this is exactly the problem that Fidji Simo needs to solve most after taking office.
This “expansion” of the CEO position will be an uphill battle for OpenAI, and it will also be an important transitional moment from a “future technology company” to a “current technology giant”.