Fidji Simo, who served as second in command to OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, before taking a medical leave in April, said on Thursday that she would not return to the job.
“Today, I shared with the OpenAI team that I have decided to leave my full-time role at OpenAI and transition to being a part-time advisor,” she said in a post to social media.
Ms. Simo joined OpenAI’s board of directors in March 2024, while serving as chief executive of the grocery delivery company Instacart. A year later, she left Instacart to become OpenAI’s first chief executive of applications, charged with overseeing the company’s engineering, product and business teams.
Her title was later changed to chief executive of A.G.I. deployment, referring to artificial general intelligence, a theoretical technology that matches the powers of the human brain.
In April, Ms. Simo took a leave of absence to deal with what was described as a chronic illness.
“It became clear that the road to recovery would be much longer and more complex than I had anticipated — and that I needed to focus on it fully,” she said in her post.
Ms. Simo, 40, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Her departure adds to the number of OpenAI executives who have changed roles or left the company in recent months. The company filed confidentially this year for an initial public offering, but has indicated that it may not be ready to go public for months.
Brad Lightcap left his longtime post as chief operating officer this year to move into a new role focused on “special projects.” Kate Rouch said she was stepping down as chief marketing officer in April to focus on cancer recovery. Kevin Weil, who oversaw science research after a brief stint as chief product officer, left OpenAI the same month.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
