OpenAI's Fidji Simo Plans to Make ChatGPT Way More Useful—and Have You Pay For It (www.wired.com)

OpenAI has installed former Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as chief executive of Applications, putting her in charge of ChatGPT and the company’s product-and-revenue roadmap while Sam Altman focuses on research and compute. Since joining in August she’s run high-impact launches—Pulse (initially in the Pro tier), which surfaces personalized summaries from users’ calendars, chat history and feedback; a jobs platform for AI-certified roles; and targeted safety work to reduce harmful mental-health responses (parental controls, age-prediction work and clinician-guided detection of signals like mania). Simo is a hands-on, Slack-driven operator who’s explicitly focused on converting OpenAI’s research lead into widely used, money-making consumer and enterprise products, and she’ll be central to decisions like rolling ads into ChatGPT’s free tier. That push has clear technical and business implications for the AI community. Simo emphasizes huge untapped product value—personal assistants and industry-specific agents built on the API and ChatGPT Enterprise—but also notes hard compute constraints: OpenAI is pursuing multibillion-dollar GPU/data-center deals to scale these compute-intensive services. The result is a tradeoff between fast, broad rollout and safety/quality guardrails (mental-health interventions, emergent-behavior monitoring), plus competition from Google, Meta and AI startups. Her role spotlights the tension between mission and monetization: scaling agent-driven features could drive substantial revenue but will require massive compute, careful safety engineering, and product design choices that shape how billions use LLMs.