From fishing family to Big Tech: French CEO takes on Silicon Valley
As OpenAI's number two, Simo will free up CEO Altman to focus on research and infrastructure while she tackles the company's operational challenges. — AFP
NEW YORK: At just 39 years old, Fidji Simo is poised to become OpenAI's second-in-command after leaving her mark at two other major tech firms, including Meta.
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 Thursday 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 scepticism.
"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
The Star
4 hours ago
- The Star
Meta to work with Singapore banks in sharing intelligence to combat scams
SINGAPORE: Social media company Meta is aiming to roll out a shared intelligence platform with local banks in Singapore to combat the scam scourge. This comes as the company looks to form a closer partnership with the Republic's law enforcement agencies to dismantle scam syndicates. First unveiled in the United Kingdom and Australia in 2024, Meta's Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange (Fire) is a platform that allows banks to share threat intelligence with the firm directly. Speaking to the media on Thursday (June 12), Meta's Singapore and Asean head of public policy Clara Koh said the firm is ready to roll out the programme globally through an industry consortium – the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Centre. She said that currently, Meta's customers who become victims of scams on its platforms have to report their experience to the firm. With Fire, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – will also be able to receive intelligence on scammers or victims from banks. Koh said the platform allows Meta to analyse data and remove the scammers' ability to commit crimes. 'But at the same time, we use the signals and patterns or behaviours of the actors to help our machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) actually better detect the bad actors. 'So yes, we are working with a few local banks to try and get them onboarded into the programme,' she added. She said more details will be shared at a later date. During a six-month pilot with UK banks NatWest and Metro Bank, Meta was able to remove some 20,000 accounts run by scammers from 185 website addresses shared by the banks. Koh was one of the panellists at an anti-scam awareness event organised by Meta on June 12 at the firm's office at Marina One. The panel also included the Singapore Police Force's Superintendent Rosie Ann McIntyre, who is assistant director of the Scam Public Education Office's operations department, and the National Crime Prevention Council's Nicholas Khoo. Local firm Eyeyah! hosting an event to raise awareness on scams with Meta and other content creators on June 12. There will be a fireside chat with content creators, the SPF, and NCPC to explore how they can collaborate to help their audiences stay vigilant, with insights into how scammers operate and the red flags to look out for. During the discussion, Supt McIntyre said that people should not be fearful if an unknown person is attempting to call or reach them through e-mail. Instead, it is important to slow down and assess the situation. 'The important thing is not to respond immediately, not to transfer money, because once it's out, it's out. The important thing is not to click a link,' said Supt McIntyre. In 2024, victims in Singapore lost a record high of $1.1 billion to scams. In total, victims here have lost more than $3.4 billion to scams since 2019. The most common ruse in 2024 was e-commerce scams, which includes concert ticket scams, with 11,665 reported cases and victims losing at least $17.5 million in total. Job scams and phishing scams rounded out the top three scam variants of concern in 2024. Some $156.2 million was lost to job scams, while victims of phishing scams lost $59.4 million across 2024. Koh said that some scams – such as ticketing scams linked to big events like mega concerts or summits – can be anticipated, which means the authorities can prepare against a spike in fraud attempts ahead of time. But others are difficult to predict. Most scams, like love scams or impersonation scams, are evergreen, which make it challenging to get ahead of, Koh said. 'You don't know how (scams) are going to evolve over time, but they evolve extremely quickly within days. Once you try and arrest a particular variant, it pivots and evolves into something else,' she added. She said Meta is also committed to fighting the scam scourge beyond just its online platforms – highlighting the human trafficking cost that comes with scam compounds run by organised crime. 'As a platform, we want to do our best to tackle the issue as it manifests... but I think equally, we also want to take real-world action on the actual criminal syndicates that are operating these (compounds),' she said. 'So we can do our part but, at the same time, we really need different segments of the ecosystem and society to work with us on the same side to really fight this scourge.' - The Straits Times/ANN
Malaysian Reserve
4 hours ago
- Malaysian Reserve
AI's arrival at work reshaping employers' hunt for talent
PARIS — Predictions of imminent AI-driven mass unemployment are likely overblown, but employers will seek workers with different skills as the technology matures, a top executive at global recruiter ManpowerGroup told AFP at Paris's Vivatech trade fair. The world's third-largest staffing firm by revenue ran a startup contest at Vivatech in which one of the contenders was building systems to hire out customisable autonomous AI 'agents', rather than humans. Their service was reminiscent of a warning last month from Dario Amodei, head of American AI giant Anthropic, that the technology could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. For ManpowerGroup, AI agents are 'certainly not going to become our core business any time soon,' the company's Chief Innovation Officer Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said. 'If history shows us one thing, it's most of these forecasts are wrong.' An International Labour Organization (ILO) report published in May found that around 'one in four workers across the world are in an occupation with some degree of exposure' to generative AI models' capabilities. 'Few jobs are currently at high risk of full automation,' the ILO added. But the UN body also highlighted 'rapid expansion of AI capabilities since our previous study' in 2023, including the emergence of 'agentic' models more able to act autonomously or semi-autonomously and use software like web browsers and email. 'Soft skills' Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that the introduction of efficiency-enhancing AI tools would put pressure on workers, managers and firms to make the most of the time they will save. 'If what happens is that AI helps knowledge workers save 30, 40, maybe 50 percent of their time, but that time is then wasted on social media, that's not an increase in net output,' he said. Adoption of AI could give workers 'more time to do creative work' — or impose 'greater standardization of their roles and reduced autonomy,' the ILO said. There's general agreement that interpersonal skills and an entrepreneurial attitude will become more important for knowledge workers as their daily tasks shift towards corralling AIs. Employers identified ethical judgement, customer service, team management and strategic thinking as top skills AI could not replace in a ManpowerGroup survey of over 40,000 employers across 42 countries published this week. Nevertheless, training that adopts those new priorities has not increased in step with AI adoption, Chamorro-Premuzic lamented. 'For every dollar you invest in technology, you need to invest eight or nine on HR, culture transformation, change management,' he said. He argued that such gaps suggest companies are still chasing automation, rather than the often-stated aim of augmenting human workers' capabilities with AI. AI hiring AI? One of the areas where AI is transforming the world of work most rapidly is ManpowerGroup's core business of recruitment. But here candidates are adopting the tools just as quickly as recruiters and companies, disrupting the old way of doing things from the bottom up. 'Candidates are able to send 500 perfect applications in one day, they are able to send their bots to interview, they are even able to game elements of the assessments,' Chamorro-Premuzic said. That extreme picture was not borne out in a survey of over 1,000 job seekers released this week by recruitment platform TestGorilla, which found just 17 percent of applicants admitting to cheating on tests, and only some of those to using AI. Jobseekers' use of consumer AI tools meets recruiters doing the same. The same TestGorilla survey found almost two-thirds of the more-than-1,000 hiring decision-makers polled used AI to generate job descriptions and screen applications. But a far smaller share are already using the technology to actually interview candidates. Where employers today are focused on candidates' skills over credentials, Chamorro-Premuzic predicted that 'the next evolution is to focus on potential, not even skills even if I know the skills you bring to the table today, they might be obsolete in six months.' 'I'm better off knowing that you're hard-working, that you are curious, that you have good people skills, that you're not a jerk — and that, AI can help you evaluate,' he believes. — AFP
The Sun
4 hours ago
- The Sun
Trump approves Nippon Steel's $14.9n takeover of US Steel
U.S. President Donald Trump approved Nippon Steel's $14.9 billion bid for U.S. Steel on Friday, capping a tumultuous 18-month effort by the companies that survived union opposition and two national security reviews. Trump signed an executive order saying the tie-up could move forward if the companies sign an agreement with the Treasury Department resolving national security concerns posed by the deal. The companies then announced they had signed the agreement, fulfilling the conditions of Trump's directive and effectively garnering approval for the merger. 'We look forward to putting our commitments into action to make American steelmaking and manufacturing great again,' the companies said in the statement, thanking Trump. They added the agreement includes $11 billion in new investments to be made by 2028 as well as governance, production and trade commitments. Nippon Steel will buy a 100% stake in U.S. Steel, a spokesperson for the Japanese company in Tokyo said on Saturday. The steelmakers provided no detail on the 'golden share' they pledged to issue to the U.S. government, raising questions about the extent of U.S. control. U.S. Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania, where U.S. Steel is headquartered, said last month the golden share would give the government veto power over key decisions relating to the American steel icon. Reuters has reported that Nippon Steel would invest an additional $3 billion for a new mill after 2028. The takeover will set up the ailing U.S. firm to receive the critical investment, allowing Nippon Steel to capitalize on a host of American infrastructure projects while its foreign competitors face steel tariffs of 50%. The Japanese firm also avoids the $565 million in breakup fees it would have had to pay if the companies had failed to secure approvals. For Nippon Steel, the world's fourth-biggest steelmaker, securing a foothold in the U.S. is key to its global growth strategy. The U.S. steel market, including high-grade steel, Nippon Steel's specialty, is growing amid rising global trade tensions. 'GREAT PARTNER' Still, some Nippon Steel investors are concerned about short-term financial pressure due to the scale of the additional investment commitment. The Japanese government, rushing to try to secure a trade deal with the U.S. by the time Trump and Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba meet at the Group of Seven summit starting on Sunday, applauded the Nippon-U.S. Steel agreement. 'The government of Japan welcomes the U.S. government's decision, as we believe this investment will enhance innovation capabilities in the U.S. and Japanese steel industries and further strengthen the close partnership between our two countries,' Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Yoji Muto said in a statement on Saturday. Friday's announcement was hardly guaranteed, even if many investors had seen approval as likely after Trump headlined a rally on May 30 giving his vague blessing to an 'investment' by Nippon Steel, which he described as a 'great partner.' Shares of U.S. Steel had dipped earlier on Friday after a Nippon Steel executive told Japan's Nikkei newspaper that the takeover required 'a degree of management freedom' to go ahead after Trump said the U.S. would be in control with the golden share. The bid has faced opposition since Nippon Steel launched it in December 2023. After the United Steelworkers union came out against the deal last year, both then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and Trump, a Republican, expressed their opposition as they sought to woo voters in the presidential campaign in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Shortly before leaving office in January, Biden blocked the deal on national security grounds, prompting lawsuits by the companies, which argued the national security review they received was biased. The Biden White House disputed the charge. The steel companies saw a new opportunity in the Trump administration, which opened a fresh 45-day national security review into the proposed merger in April. But Trump's public comments, ranging from welcoming a simple 'investment' in U.S. Steel by the Japanese firm to floating a minority stake for Nippon Steel, spurred confusion.
