From fishing family to Big Tech: French CEO Fidji Simo joins OpenAI as second-in-command
Reporting directly to CEO Sam Altman, the move to the ChatGPT-maker represents the latest chapter in a career that has taken Simo from a fishing family in France's Mediterranean port of Sete to the heights of Silicon Valley.
As the current CEO of grocery delivery platform Instacart, she cuts a unique profile: a French woman in the male-dominated American tech landscape — who resists advice to blend in.
'I can put all my energy trying to be someone else or I can be myself and pour all of that energy into what I can create,' she told CNBC in February.
This philosophy will likely be on display when she appears yesterday at the VivaTech conference in Paris.
Raised in Sete, Simo attended the elite HEC business school before joining eBay in 2006, first in France then in California.
'People expect a very business-like story for why I decided to come to the US. It wasn't. The American Dream was on TV every night and that was an incredibly appealing thing,' she said.
'Never Intimidated'
In 2011, Simo joined Facebook, now Meta. She was given responsibility for video and monetisation in 2014, a role she considers the defining moment of her career.
Simo championed the company's pivot to video, which became central to Meta's strategy despite initial internal skepticism.
'She never let herself be intimidated,' recalled David Marcus, who worked at Meta alongside Simo and now serves as CEO of online payment company Lightspark.
'She had an ability to challenge Mark (Zuckerberg) and push him, when others would have hesitated.'
Joining Instacart in 2021, Simo inherited a company that had been bleeding money for a decade.
Under her leadership, the grocery delivery platform achieved profitability in 2022 through aggressive diversification: data monetisation, expanded retail partnerships and a robust advertising business.
Now Simo faces her biggest test yet. As OpenAI's number two, she'll free up CEO Altman to focus on research and infrastructure while she tackles the company's operational challenges.
Despite being one of history's most highly funded startups and ChatGPT's phenomenal success, OpenAI is burning cash at an alarming rate.
The company has also weathered significant leadership turnover, including Altman's own brief ouster and reinstatement in 2023, raising questions about management stability.
But French investor Julien Codorniou, who worked alongside Simo at Facebook, said she will more than rise to the occasion.
'Fidji's arrival is a declaration of ambition by OpenAI,' he said. — AFP
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Malay Mail
5 hours ago
- Malay Mail
Inside LatAm-GPT: Chile leads regional effort to build culturally relevant AI with a Latin American pulse
Latam-GPT aims to reflect Latin America's culture Trained on nearly 3 million regional documents Aims to use AI to preserve Indigenous languages BUENOS AIRES, Aug 3 — 'Tell me the most recent relevant books and novels from Chile.' That was the prompt Chilean engineers at the state-run National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA) gave OpenAI's ChatGPT to test its grasp of Latin America culture. But when the chatbot replied with only titles by renowned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and not much else, researchers were not impressed. 'It seemed like it only knew Neruda's work,' said Carlos Aspillaga, a computer science engineer at CENIA, who worked on the project. 'The model lacked diversity and wasn't locally accurate. Worse, some of the books it mentioned didn't even exist, or had factual errors.' The exchange highlighted a key limitation of mainstream AI, revealing that it struggles with regional precision and nuance. That means its responses can lack accuracy or contain mistakes when addressing highly localised matters, particularly in small countries with languages other than English. Mainstream large language models, though equipped with multilingual capabilities, are predominantly trained on English-language content that still dominates the internet. Much of the data related to Latin America comes from Spain, or is translated from texts originally written in English, which could explain why the models often fail to produce content that feels authentic or culturally grounded to Latin American users. That realisation sparked CENIA's two-year effort to create a GPT-style language model rooted in Latin America and one that reflects the region's diverse culture and languages. The result is LatAm-GPT, set to launch this September as the first large language model in the region. Built with input from more than 30 regional institutions, and developed specifically for Latin America, it is a milestone in a global AI race that could leaving emerging economies behind. 'What's crucial for Latin America is to jump on this technology now,' Aspillaga told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 'We're at a point where it's still feasible to adopt and adapt existing techniques. Maybe in five years, that window would close. This lets us start building our own know-how,' he said. Building cultural nuance Unlike widely known models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Meta's LLaMA, LatAm-GPT flips the dynamic of relying heavily English language and global North datasets. It is exposed heavily to Latin American data, with an important focus on local languages, idioms and expressions. The team is also working on preserving Indigenous languages. The first version of LatAm-GPT includes around 70 billion tokens — words and word fragments — in Spanish, Portuguese and English. It draws from more than 8 terabytes of regional data and nearly 3 million documents, including books, Wikipedia entries, and a myriad of texts obtained through partnerships with libraries and universities across Latin America and Spain. The largest economies in the region — Brazil and Mexico — contributed the bulk of this material. While smaller in scale than the most advanced global models, its architecture is closer to ChatGPT-2 than the current GPT-4, but LatAm-GPT's edge lies elsewhere. It is not the quantity, but the quality of the data and its relevance. 'We're feeding the model concentrated knowledge about Latin America,' said Aspillaga. 'Global models aim to cover all the world's knowledge. We're focused on a niche where we can actually outperform them.' CENIA researchers believe LatAm-GPT could be especially useful in schools and other local applications that need accuracy on regional affairs. 'Right now, the available models aren't accurate or complete when it comes to local issues. They don't understand how locals speak or think,' Aspillaga said. 'It shouldn't be the person who adapts to the technology, it should be the technology adapting to them.' Indigenous languages Another goal of the center is to help preserve endangered Indigenous languages. One of its most prominent projects has taken place 3,700 km off the Chilean coast, on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), often described as the most remote inhabited place on Earth. There, researchers worked with the local community to build an AI-powered translator for the Rapa Nui language, part of a broader strategy to revitalise and digitally preserve it. 'Rapa Nui is currently at risk because there are very few fluent speakers,' said Jackeline Rapu, who leads the Rapa Nui Language Academy. 'This digital repository is really important. It supports all the linguistic revitalisation efforts we've been working on and helps young people reconnect with the language.' Latin America is not alone in building home-grown models and AI-powered tools. Around the world, governments are racing to create AI systems tailored to local languages and needs. The United Arab Emirates government, for example, has launched Falcon and Jais to advance Arabic AI. India is developing BharatGPT to support more than 14 regional languages, led by public universities and backed by the Department of Science & Technology, in partnership with AI firm CoRover. In South Korea, tech giant Naver Corporation has introduced HyperCLOVA for Korean, while AI Singapore, a national programme funded by Singapore's government, is building SEA-LION to serve Southeast Asia. LatAm-GPT's development also reflects growing political momentum for AI cooperation in the region. In April, Chile and Brazil signed a Memorandum of Understanding to jointly advance AI research, with Brazil officially joining the LatAm-GPT initiative. Last year, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva unveiled a national AI strategy that includes investing more than US$4 billion (RM17.1 billion) by 2028 to boost the industry, while Argentina has expressed ambitions to become a global AI and data hub. Today, major platforms offer slightly more nuanced answers to prompts about Chilean literature. The same query today no longer just mentions Neruda, but also brings up other renowned authors like Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral or Chilean writer Jose Donoso. 'When it comes to AI, we're always going to be behind countries like the United States, but that doesn't mean we can't do something useful, and that's our ultimate goal,' Aspillaga said. — Thomson Reuters Foundation
Malay Mail
a day ago
- Malay Mail
Bog Apple: New York turns to pod toilets in public loo crisis
NEW YORK, Aug 2 — Faced with closed restrooms, vandalised facilities and lavatory deserts, New Yorkers and visitors to the city alike confront a host of hurdles to relieve themselves when out and about. In its latest efforts to combat this problem, the Big Apple has turned to a Portland-based company that designs modular public conveniences it claims are city-proof. The products, dubbed 'Portland Loos,' are the brainchild of Madden Fabrication and have garnered something of a cult following around the versatile, kiosk-like facilities which the company says are far cheaper than traditional toilet buildings. Such public toilet pods have already been installed in 250 locations throughout the United States. New York has pledged to build 49 new public bathrooms by 2029 to combat the lack of toilets across the five boroughs. Currently, there are approximately 1,100 public conveniences for the megacity's 8.4 million people, according to official estimates. 'Simple but durable' The city will spend US$150 million (RM641.6 million) on building new restrooms and renovating 36 existing sites. At the US$200,000 unit installed in the Bronx's Joyce Kilmer park, two blocks from Yankee Stadium baseball park, bystanders eyed the new fixture with interest. One man accidentally activated the hand dryer, part of a sink fitting located on the outside of the booth. A spokesman for the company described the design as 'simple but durable,' with the basin placed outside in order to keep people moving and avoid a 'hotel effect.' 'Hell yeah, we haven't had a bathroom in this area in forever,' said lifelong Bronx resident Carlos Lopez, describing discrepancies in public restroom access between lower-income and wealthier neighbourhoods. For the five trial units ordered, New York insisted on a higher grade of stainless steel and other modifications to meet strict planning rules. Street photographer Elijah Dominique, who lives near the park, said public bathrooms were especially important for unhoused people. 'We've got a lot of homeless people in this area,' Dominique said. 'Those are the people who really need these bathrooms. It's good for them — and for us too so that we're not stepping in (waste) on the sidewalks. Nobody wants that.' — AFP
Free Malaysia Today
a day ago
- Free Malaysia Today
P&G estimates US$1bil tariff hit, plans some US price hikes
Bottles of Tide detergent, a Procter & Gamble product, are displayed for sale in a pharmacy in Los Angeles. (AFP pic) NEW YORK : Procter & Gamble executives projected a US$1 billion hit from US tariffs over the next year on Tuesday as the consumer products giant said it would institute limited price hikes in the United States. The maker of Tide laundry detergent and Pampers diapers reported an uptick in quarterly profits following slightly higher sales, even as executives described more reticent consumer behaviour compared with earlier in 2025. 'The market growth in the US and Europe is slowing versus what we saw at the beginning of the year,' said CFO Andre Schulten, describing shoppers as 'more selective' and driven by value. P&G reported profits of US$3.6 billion in the quarter ending June 30, up 15% from the year-ago level. Revenues rose two percent to US$20.9 billion. Schulten, in a conference call with analysts, said about US$200 million of the estimated US tariff hit is due to products imported from China, with another US$200 million from Canada. The remaining US$600 million come from the rest of the world. P&G executives acknowledged that these figures could be lowered if US President Donald Trump strikes deals that lead to decreased levies from those built into estimates. But P&G executives said they don't have enough details about the just-announced deal between the United States and Europe to update the forecast. They also pointed to the uncertainty of whether Trump administration investigations into the trading practics of other countries will result in additional tariffs. P&G plans mid-single-digit price hikes on about one-quarter of its US products, translating into about two to 2.5% inflation across its portfolio, Schulten said. Schulten said the move is consistent with P&G's long-term strategy, which includes raising prices on premium items that offer better performance, such as premium detergents or electric toothbrushes. 'We believe the price adjustments are adequate,' Schulten said. 'They are moderate and they are combined with innovation to improve the overall value for the consumer.' P&G announced on Monday night that Jon Moeller would step down as CEO and be replaced by COO Shailesh Jejurikar on January 1, 2026. Jejurikar joined the company in 1989 and was promoted to the leadership team in 2014. Moeller will transition to become P&G's executive chairman. P&G shares were flat around midday.
