The director of the Instacart racing delivery platform is appointed director general of the applications of the artificial intelligence giant.
Head of the Facebook application, Director General of Instacart, an American service deliveries, and now an official number 2 of Openai. At 39, the Frenchwoman Fiji Simo, from Sète, continues her dazzling success story in the Silicon Valley.
In a few weeks, she will join the world giant of artificial intelligence as applications, who includes Chatgpt. This newly created position will allow the managing director Sam Altman to focus more on basic research, security and infrastructure of the AI. His group will indeed build data centers in the United States, a plan announced with great fanfare at the start of the year at the White House under the name of Stargate.
“We have launched Openai as a research laboratory. For two years, we have added two new activities ”what are commercial application services, with chatgpt and others, “Who serve hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and grow quickly”said Sam Altman. “More recently, we embarked on the infrastructure (…) each of these branches could be a group in its own right”he underlines. The creation of this position responds to this size change of the company, the valuation of which increased from 29 to 300 billion dollars in just over two years.
Member of the Board of Directors of Openai since 2024
Fishermen’s daughter from Spain and Italy, Fiji Simo joined Silicon Valley after an internship carried out at Ebay France as part of her studies at HEC. Transferred to California, she left the online auction specialist in 2011 to join Facebook. She quickly climbed the ladder there, becoming in 2017 vice-president responsible for video and monetization, then in 2019 responsible for the Facebook application. She left to join Instacart as CEO in 2021.
“Fiji has a rare combination”continues Sam Altman, “Between his ability to direct, his product and operational expertise, and his commitment to our technology to benefit everyone.” The manager knows OpenAI well for having been appointed to her board of directors in March 2024.
“It was an incredibly difficult decision”wrote Fiji Simo on LinkedIn, but “It was complicated to refuse the possibility of maneuvering one of the most important elements of our collective future”. She will leave Instacact after having assured the transition with her successor, not yet appointed, and will remain president of the board of directors.
