OpenAI has announced a major leadership reorganisation as its chief executive of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, embarks on week of medical leave. OpenAI president, Greg Brockman will take charge of the product teams in Simo’s absence. The company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, and one of the CEO’s top deputies, Sam Altman, will take over “special projects” role.
The chief marketing officer, Kate Rouch is taking a leave of absence to focus on her health. Rouch, who has been undergoing treatment for breast cancer, is expected on her return to take “a different, more narrowly scoped role,” according to a note shared by Simo with an OpenAI staff.
“As I shared when I joined, I had a relapse of my neuroimmune condition a few weeks before starting the job,” Simo was quoted as saying in the note which also sent in OpenAI’s “core” Slack channel, according to a report by WIRED.
“It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster since, and the last month has been particularly rough health-wise. For my entire time here, I’ve postponed medical tests and new therapies to stay completely focused on the job and not miss a single day of work.
I took time off for the first time two weeks before the break for some medical tests, and it’s now clear that I’ve pushed a little too far and I really need to try new interventions to stabilise my health,” he said. Simo is expected to take “several weeks” of leave according to her internal post.
In his new role, Lightcap will be in charge of the company’s forward-deployed engineers, which embed within enterprise organizations and help integrate OpenAI’s technology, among other duties. OpenAI will begin searching for a new CMO, Simo said. The company is also looking for a chief communications officer to replace Hannah Wong, who left her position in January. Chris Lehane has taken over as the leader of the communications team in the interim.
“We have a strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, growing our global user base of nearly 1 billion users, and powering enterprise use cases,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in a statement. “We’re well-positioned to keep executing with continuity and momentum.”
