OpenAI has a new number two. President Greg Brockman is now in charge of the company’s most lucrative and high-profile projects, following the departure of product chief Fidji Simo, who stepped down Thursday due to a chronic health condition. Simo, a former Meta executive and ex-CEO of Instacart, spent about a year shaping OpenAI’s product roadmap and helping the company scale. Diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) in 2019, she took medical leave in April and will now serve as a part-time advisor.
Brockman, an OpenAI co-founder, took over product duties during Simo’s absence and will keep leading those efforts, according to a person familiar with the plans who spoke on condition of anonymity. He now oversees the ChatGPT product business, go-to-market teams, enterprise operations, and compute initiatives. Reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman, Brockman faces mounting pressure to generate revenue and justify OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation as the company prepares for what is expected to be a historic IPO. OpenAI confidentially filed its prospectus with regulators in June but has not set a debut date, with reports suggesting a delay until next year.
The company is also battling intensifying competition from rivals like Anthropic, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI, along with cheaper open-weight models from China. ChatGPT’s market share dipped below 50% for the first time in March, per Sensor Tower, and OpenAI has been aggressively promoting its coding assistant, Codex, to attract more users. CFO Sarah Friar and strategy chief Jason Kwon will report directly to Altman, and the company does not plan to replace Simo. Brockman co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others, including Musk, in 2015. The two have been close allies; when Altman was briefly ousted in 2023, Brockman quit in solidarity, and both returned days later. They were also at the center of a high-profile lawsuit from Musk earlier this year, which an advisory jury dismissed, ruling Musk waited too long to sue. "I think the tech we are developing is transformative," Brockman testified. "This is going to be the most important technological shift in human history."
Source: CNBC