Three months ago, Fidji Simo announced she would take medical leave from OpenAI. She was the company’s “CEO, AGI deployment,” a demanding job that involved overseeing more than half of OpenAI’s workforce and running nearly every aspect of the business of AI while CEO Sam Altman handled research and compute. But she’d also been struggling with the chronic neuroimmune condition POTS and experienced a relapse before starting the job of a lifetime last year.
“It’s now clear that I’ve pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilize my health,” she told employees in April. “I can’t wait to be back in the arena with you all soon.”
Sadly, it didn’t work out that way. Simo announced last night that she won’t return to her full-time role at OpenAI and will instead become a part-time advisor. During her medical leave, “it became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated—and that I needed to focus on it fully,” she wrote on X.
It’s a huge loss for OpenAI. Simo had become one of the most powerful women in the field, determining how AI would be integrated into every aspect of our lives, making decisions like the prioritization of OpenAI’s forthcoming “superapp.” (Even though she was on medical leave, we kept her at No. 28 on this year’s Most Powerful Women list.) She was even overseeing other important execs like CFO Sarah Friar, freeing Altman up from management duties. After OpenAI’s IPO, Simo would have been a key executive at the public company.
