OpenAI Appoints Instacart CEO Fidji Simo As CEO Of Applications, Reporting To Top Boss Sam Altman

Instacart (CART) CEO Fidji Simo is joining OpenAI in a newly created role as CEO of Applications, according to social media posts from Simo and OpenAI boss Sam Altman.

Simo joined the OpenAI board in March 2024 and has been the chair and CEO of Instacart since August 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The senior appointment follows last year’s hiring of Kevin Weil—former executive at Twitter and Meta (META)—as OpenAI’s chief product officer.

OpenAI recently raised a massive $40-billion funding round, led by SoftBank, and gave up its plans to convert to a for-profit entity, ending a storm of criticism and legal challenges.

The AI trailblazer is in an intense battle for supremacy in large language models (LLMs) and AI applications, competing against local heavyweights like Microsoft and Amazon and the Chinese industry led by Alibaba (BABA) and DeepSeek.

"Fidji is exceptional; we have worked together on openai for the past year and i have observed her deep commitment to our mission," Altman said in his X post.

"I cannot imagine a better new team member to help us scale the next 10x (or 100x, let's see)." 

Altman will remain the CEO of OpenAI and will now focus more on research, compute, and safety, he said.

Simo will report to Altman. It is unclear when she is moving to the role.

In her X post, Simo said she will remain the CEO of Instacart "for the next few months and Chair of the board after that".

Shares of Maplebear, Instacart's parent company, were down 0.8% in premarket trading on Thursday.

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