• Google insiders view Demis Hassabis' move to chief scientist as a way to find the next leap in AI.
• Since the Google DeepMind merger, some of Hassabis' focus has been pulled away from research.
• Hassabis had been moving away from day-to-day managerial work for about a year.

Google needs a win in the AI race. Employees say moving Demis Hassabis into a chief scientist role is the kind of gambit that could deliver one as the industry pushes toward AI that can surpass human intelligence.

Google's shock leadership reshuffle on Wednesday, which saw longtime chief scientist Jeff Dean depart and Hassabis step down as DeepMind CEO, comes at a critical juncture for the search giant.

After riding high in late 2025, the company is trailing the competition in coding — AI's first big commercial takeoff — and continues to postpone its new frontier model.

Placing Hassabis in his new role at Google parent company Alphabet gives it a longer-horizon view that some insiders said could help it make bigger leaps in areas beyond chatbots and coding. Hassabis will also become chair of DeepMind, the company said.

"He doesn't care about chatbots," said one longtime Googler of Hassabis, who was among six current and former employees who spoke to Business Insider. "He wants to use AI to cure cancer."

A Google spokesperson pointed Business Insider to its blog announcing the leadership changes.

Hassabis' balancing act

In recent months, Hassabis has found a new favorite phrase. We are, he likes to say, in "the foothills of the Singularity."

Those five words about the moment when AI substantially overtakes human capabilities offer a clue to what Hassabis thinks is important: helping usher in the next major leap in artificial intelligence.

Hassabis, who cofounded DeepMind in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, has long been passionate about AI's potential for scientific breakthroughs — even when they aren't an obvious revenue generator for his employer.

He oversaw AlphaFold, an AI system that solved the 50-year-old protein-folding problem, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2025, he told The Guardian that, if he had controlled AI's development path, he might have kept it in the laboratory longer to pursue more AlphaFold-like achievements and "maybe cured cancer."

However, after Google fully absorbed DeepMind in 2023, he found himself in a balancing act between pushing the frontiers of AI and helping Google shore up its commercial products with AI. That has at times involved Hassabis wading into company politics to resolve team tensions or focusing on product development that interests him less, Business Insider previously reported.

At times, two insiders said, Hassabis appeared to relent to corporate realities. When Google removed its red lines on building AI for weapons or surveillance — which was marked by a blog post with Hassabis' name on it — it was a direct reversal of a position Hassabis had previously held. The change in stance has caused tensions in the workforce and some departures.

'An incredible new age of discovery and wonder'

Over the past year, Hassabis' attention has moved away from corporate politicking and day-to-day management to the bigger-picture impacts of AI, according to some inside the company.

Google employees have different views on whether the new role will give him more or less influence over these types of issues inside the company, and whether it's a promotion or a demotion.

"I'm not sure I would call it a move up or down," one longtime senior Googler who has worked closely with Hassabis told Business Insider. "I think it's just a move towards what he's passionate about and maybe where the organization needs him."

On Thursday, tech analyst and cofounder of Turing Company, Jiang Liu, responded on X to reports of Hassabis' shift away from CEO duties over the last year, saying it was "actually a good thing."

While the markets didn't like Hassabis' move — Google's stock dropped as much as 6% on the news — it's a "formalization of something that had been happening informally," said Sebastian Mallaby, the author of a biography of Hassabis and DeepMind, in a post on X.

Externally, Hassabis has increasingly become the face of Google's AI efforts, meeting with President Donald Trump and other AI leaders in recent months to discuss his long-running concern: AI safety.

In a note to DeepMind staff shared publicly by Google on Wednesday, Hassabis captured what he sees as the urgency of the moment: "I've been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand," he wrote. "It's critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."

Google's brain drain

Google's big bet on moving Hassabis comes amid a talent drain at the company.

Dean said on Wednesday that he and three other top AI researchers, including his longtime Google collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat, were departing to start their own company.

In recent months, Noam Shazeer, a key figure on Google's Gemini work, and John Jumper, one of the scientists behind Alphafold, also departed. Meanwhile, the company keeps delaying its next frontier model, Gemini 3.5 Pro.

Teams inside Google DeepMind have been working to improve Gemini's AI coding capabilities as rivals OpenAI and Anthropic scoop up customers. Google has discussed a deal with AI agent coding startup Mechanize, Business Insider reported this week.

While coding has proven to be AI's first major commercial application, every AI lab is looking to what's next. Freeing Hassabis up to take a longer-term perspective would both satisfy the chess prodigy's interests and help Google get ahead of the next big thing. If the singularity is as close as Hassabis predicts, it will require deep thinking about everything from safety to how compute is allocated.

In response to the news of Google's shuffle, OpenAI's former chief futurist, Joshua Achiam, said he saw the changes as smart bets.

"Being in a leadership role on the next frontier" is more crucial right now, he said in a post on X. This may be the motivating factor behind both Hassabis' move and Dean's departure to form his own AI company, Achiam posited.

"Early AI/AGI/ASI leads will, over the next year, begin leaving what look like important leadership posts to go place their bets on what they think the most important thing will be," he wrote.

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Ashton McGrady was horrified to discover that TikTok had slapped an "AI-generated" label on a post she'd made for Disability Pride Month.

The creator had spent hours making a collage of images, stickers, and advice.

"It was really jarring to me, because that's not something that I personally align with, and neither does my audience," McGrady told Business Insider. "The whole point of being a creator is to create myself." The post later had its AI note removed without explanation.

McGrady's upload was one of the billions that TikTok says it has flagged using a mix of human labeling and automated tools. McGrady said she had a similar experience with a different post on Meta-owned Instagram, too.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram say AI labeling offers more transparency to viewers, but the inexact processes have led to misclassifications, seven creators say. Some platforms acknowledge they're not always accurate at spotting AI, using phrases like Meta's "likely created or modified with AI" to hedge. For creators, even the suggestion that they've published AI content can feel damaging to their reputations.

Gregory Littley, who frequently posts photography to his Instagram, said several of his posts — which include scans of physical Polaroids — say that the "content in this post may have been modified with AI."

"I cringe when I see that label," Littley said. "I cringe even more when I know it's not true."

These labels could have real consequences for creators in a time of intense AI backlash. It's particularly relevant in the $12 billion US influencer marketing industry, where authenticity and human connection are paramount. An AI hiccup can turn an audience against an influencer. YouTuber Hank Green, for example, recently apologized after coming under fire for using ChatGPT to help research a script.

"It's literally the Scarlet Letter," creator Lissette Calveiro said about AI labels and accusations of producing AI-assisted work. Some brands have begun adding stipulations in campaign briefs that creators can't use generative AI.

In recent weeks, AI has been thrust into the center of the creator conversation. Substack's CEO took a shot at AI-generated LinkedIn posts while debuting a new AI detection partnership. Days later, LinkedIn announced a button to flag suspected "AI slop." YouTube has been pulling down channels that host "low-quality" AI content, and Snapchat has made videos wholly generated by AI ineligible for recommendation in its short-form video feed, Spotlight.

Both openly using AI and promoting AI companies are increasingly seen as risky in creator economy circles. The concern is warranted. Influencers who attended a recent luxury retreat hosted by OpenAI faced immediate online backlash.

"There's a PR issue with AI as it relates to taking people's jobs and environmental concerns around data centers," said Eric Bogard, CEO of the talent firm UnderCurrent Management. "Creators are hesitant to promote AI companies as a result."

At the same time, there's no real path of purity as an influencer traversing content creation in 2026. Nearly every platform automatically uses or pushes AI tools, from Adobe Photoshop to TikTok's CapCut. In many ways, AI tools have helped creators balance the workload of managing their social media accounts and brand deals, as well as brainstorming.

Companies like OpenAI want creators to be more open about their use of AI.

Charles Porch, who OpenAI poached from Meta this year to lead creative partnerships, recently told Business Insider that part of his job is getting creators to "come out of the closet" about using AI.

"Whether creators choose to share how they use AI publicly is entirely up to them," an OpenAI spokesperson said.

AI's 'PR issue'

AI is infiltrating many aspects of modern life — and content creation is no exception.

A May survey of 16,000 creators conducted by Adobe, in partnership with The Harris Poll, found that 75% of creators who had used or tried creative AI described it as "integrated or essential to how they work."

Not all creators want to admit that publicly, though, lest they wear the AI "Scarlet Letter" on their chest.

YouTube creator Billy Yue, who goes by 8illy, isn't shying away from AI. He even made a promotional video for Anthropic's Claude in November. Still, the creator, who regularly features hand-drawn animation in his videos, added a disclosure at the end of his most recent YouTube upload that "no AI was used" in the production. He wanted fans to know that he'd drawn 1,800 illustrations for the project.

Broader public opinion is shifting, and creators feel it.

The influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy found that the share of consumers who viewed generative AI as a "negative disruptor" increased from 18% in 2023 to 32% in 2025. Those who saw it as a "positive disruptor" declined from 34% to 31%. The firm surveyed 4,000 consumers ages 16 or older in the UK and the US.

"Part of this backlash is every platform is filled with slop," said Max Spero, CEO of AI detection startup Pangram. "It feels like the algorithms are shoving it in your face. It feels like it's harder and harder to find things made with craft by real people." Pangram recently partnered with Substack on an integration that detects whether — and how much — AI was used in writing newsletters and comments.

Concerns about "AI slop" have become a focus on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, which all have automated AI detection tools that help identify content that is either entirely AI-generated or substantially edited with AI.

Lawmakers have also gotten in the mix. The European Union and New York state recently developed laws requiring brands to inform viewers when AI-generated characters appear in ads.

AI labels aren't foolproof

As platforms have rushed to ramp up their AI labeling, creators like McGrady say they have become the victims of false positives.

Lindsey Lee Lugrin, a content creator and model, recently posted some paintings she had made by hand. However, her Instagram posts included a label that said they were "likely created or modified with AI."

In some instances, using popular editing tools like Canva or Adobe's Lightroom resulted in content on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok being flagged as potentially AI-generated.

While third-party platforms like Pangram can assist with AI identification, none are completely accurate. (Substack added options in its AI detection feature for creators to dispute a Pangram assessment, explain how and why they used AI, and even disable the tool altogether.)

Slip-ups can be a risk for both creators and brands.

McGrady said that if a post made in partnership with a brand was flagged as AI, it could "harm your relationship with the brand."

Advertisers are well aware of the public backlash an AI-heavy ad can bring.

Brands are taking proactive action to prevent this. Five creators and talent managers said there had been an increase in clauses in partnership briefs and contracts that explicitly state that creators cannot use AI in parts of the content process — particularly in scriptwriting, captions, and visual edits.

"If you're a brand, you obviously don't want to see an influencer you hire have a 100% negative comment section," said Jack Appleby, a relatively AI-positive creator and social media strategist. "If you're not an AI brand, you probably avoid AI right now, just because there's no reason to risk it."

There is no escaping the AI era

Despite the blowback, AI pervades many aspects of content creation.

Photo and video editing apps use it, whether loudly or under the hood. If you use Instagram's fancy font tools when making a Story post, it will trigger a tag that says the text has been "restyled with AI."

"It's really difficult to have a fully AI-free experience right now, no matter what line of work you're in," Calveiro said. "I think a lot more people are using it than they want to admit."

There are real benefits to some tools, too.

"I very frequently tell my audience that there are ethical and moral reasons to use AI. When I do, it's from an accessibility perspective," McGrady said. "But I am a person who proudly says that I do not use generative AI."

The backlash against creators' use of AI may ease in the coming months as AI-powered creative tools become ubiquitous. Labeling efforts could shift toward flagging only fully AI-generated posts.

More transparency about how AI is used could reduce headaches for creators and platforms alike, making room for them to explore how the tech can expand their creativity.

"I'm very honest about how I use AI," Appleby said. "I don't really run from it. If a piece of content entertains or educates or provides value to somebody, for the most part, they shouldn't really care."

• CFOs are taking charge of AI spending as companies pour billions into the technology.
• Some are introducing AI budgets and new controls to keep costs from spiraling.
• "The CFO is really becoming the face of the AI story," said a PwC advisor to finance chiefs.

At Match Group, every employee now has an AI budget.

The parent company of Tinder, Hinge, and other dating apps recently began giving department heads a set amount to spend on AI, which is then distributed across their teams. Employees can track their usage on a dashboard, and if they want to exceed their budget, they have to explain why. The company's most expensive AI models also aren't available by default and require a specific use case.

"If you don't set guardrails, there's no reason for an engineer to not go use the most expensive model," said Match Group CFO Steve Bailey. The average software engineer at the company spends roughly $600 a month on AI tokens, he said.

Match Group's system reflects a growing reality across corporate America: As companies spend billions on AI, CFOs are emerging as some of the most powerful executives in the AI era.

Finance chiefs are doing more than signing off on AI budgets. In many cases, they're the ones deciding who gets access to AI tools, how much employees can spend, which vendors make the cut, and whether AI investments are generating enough value to justify costs.

"The CFO is really becoming the face of the AI story," said Peter Pollini, a PwC advisor to finance chiefs in the financial-services sector.

A spending boom

The stakes are enormous. Match Group initially allocated $5 million for AI this year, but it's now on track to spend double that amount, Bailey said. The increase followed CEO Spencer Rascoff's May push to make the company more AI-native by expanding access to AI tools across the workforce. Initially, they were available mainly to engineers.

"Aside from maybe travel and entertainment, we've never had to budget for a cost that's this big at the employee level," Bailey said.

To help fund those investments, Bailey said Match Group plans to dramatically slow hiring while it assesses how AI could reshape its workforce.

Across corporate America, similar calculations are turning CFOs into the gatekeepers of one of the biggest spending booms in decades.

At Elevance Health, CFO Mark Kaye oversees a hidden way of keeping AI costs from spiraling. The insurance giant quietly routes employees' queries to different AI models based on the complexity of the request. That's because a single prompt can cost anywhere from a few pennies to more than a dollar, depending on how many tokens, or units of data, employees gobble up.

"We manage it on the back end," said Kaye, adding that he expects Elevance Health, the parent of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, to invest $1 billion or more on AI this year.

Making AI pay off

Some CFOs are making tough decisions about how to fund AI expenses at large, such as by freezing annual salary raises and laying off workers. Others say AI is helping to pay for itself.

Kaye said AI automation at Elevance has reduced administrative work tied to medical-chart reviews by roughly 40%, giving staff more time to support customers.

"There are significant inefficiencies in the system that AI is allowing us to take out," he said.

Keeping a tight leash on AI spending isn't the only new hurdle for CFOs. They're also responsible for managing spending on a category that is evolving more rapidly than previous generations of enterprise software.

For the first time this year, Xero, a global small-business platform that offers accounting, payroll, and payments, added a line item to its budget for AI token spending per employee, said Claire Bramley, the CFO. The company also created a task force to review software purchases and identify AI products it can do without.

"Do we have more than one tool that serves the same purpose?" Bramley said. "As a CFO, you want to make sure that everybody's not going off and doing their own thing."

AI is also changing who CFOs spend time with. Bramley said finance, technology, and HR leaders at Xero now work together more frequently to evaluate software purchases, hiring plans, and how AI could affect future staffing needs.

"You could probably do it once a month before, and I think you have to do it weekly today," she said.

Additional headaches

CFOs are also facing new business problems arising from AI.

Netta Samroengraja, finance chief at healthcare platform Zocdoc, said her team has had to hustle to evaluate AI tool providers to solve problems that, ironically, were created by the technology. In recruiting, for instance, the technology suddenly enabled job seekers to flood the company with applications and create phony personas.

"It was pretty prevalent very quickly, and so we had to react quickly," Samroengraja said.

That wasn't the only surprise, as the economics of AI were shifting, too. Early on, Zocdoc raced to vet vendors, anticipating that prices designed to attract customers at the start of the AI boom would increase over time.

The company used that window to test multiple providers and compare their cost and effectiveness before settling on the tools that delivered the strongest business results, Samroengraja said, adding that Zocdoc has been willing to spend more on tools that produce measurable business outcomes rather than optimize for the lowest possible AI spend.

"If you see the ROI in it, you should keep investing in this," she said.

A crowded AI market is making those decisions even harder. New providers are constantly pitching tools that promise to boost productivity, cut costs, or replace existing software, forcing many CFOs to take a more active role in evaluating vendors, said Alex Sobol, cofounder of the Millennium Alliance, an invite-only community for C-suite executives in North America and Europe.

"It seems like every hour there's a new AI vendor," he said. "It's hard to know what's real and what's fake, and what's good and what's bad."

OpenAI has built one of the most popular products in the world. Now it has to figure out how to pay for it.

Enter Fidji Simo.

Simo, the 40-year-old former Instacart CEO and longtime Meta executive, became OpenAI's product boss in August under CEO Sam Altman. While Altman has long been the face of OpenAI, Simo is increasingly shaping how the company operates and makes money.

"Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy," Simo, whose title is CEO of applications, told Business Insider.

Altman defers to Simo when he doesn't feel strongly, she said, and they "debate it out" when he does.

As OpenAI races toward a possible IPO later this year, Simo, who oversees nearly two-thirds of the company, has a delicate balancing act. She must craft a strategy to make products profitable, while convincing staffers who joined a research-driven organization that commercialization won't change the mission.

The stakes are high. Deutsche Bank estimated that OpenAI is expected to amass the "largest startup losses in history," totaling a projected $143 billion between 2024 and 2029. (An OpenAI spokesperson said that figure is incorrect, and one person familiar with the numbers said OpenAI's internal projections are in line with other reports of $111 billion cash burn by 2030.)

Competitors like Anthropic and Google are starting to erode OpenAI's early and commanding lead and, in some cases, surging ahead. Anthropic's coding tool has outperformed OpenAI's even after the latter made dominance in coding its top priority, a person familiar with internal goals told Business Insider.

OpenAI and Simo now face pressure to create the most powerful models and turn them into accessible and marketable products that can sustain the enormous cost of training and deployment.

"This AI moment is so unique that there is really no blueprint for OpenAI to follow," UBS analyst Karl Keirstead told Business Insider. "This is uncharted territory."

In an interview, Simo was warm and charismatic — a charm paired with a reputation for intensity and follow-through. This month, she unveiled a strategy shift for the company: an increased focus on coding and enterprise users.

"We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests," Simo told employees at an all-hands meeting, according to a person familiar with her remarks. The company needs to nail productivity — primarily on the business side, and then on the consumer side, she said. "Everything else is going to have to take a backseat to those priorities."

Former colleagues said they were familiar with this laser focus.

One former Meta employee recalled a moment when, after a contentious meeting, Simo sent a one-line follow-up saying she was unlikely to change her mind, so the team shouldn't waste time trying to persuade her. She has little patience for internal debates that lose sight of the product, the former employee said, and she's skilled at "being super clear in her directive so teams don't scramble and waste time."

Priya Monga, who served as Simo's chief of staff at Facebook and Instacart and is now director of go-to-market strategy at Instacart, said Simo arrives at any new role having mapped out the full journey.

"She knows she's going from A to Z, and she sees that right at the beginning," Monga said. "In the back of her mind, she has already really thought a lot about the broader visionary 10-year road map."

Interviews with Simo, current and former OpenAI employees, and former colleagues reveal how she's approaching one of the company's most crucial years — and the mark she's already made on it.

Competing for resources

A few months after she joined OpenAI, Simo invited the company's researchers to a series of roundtable meetings.

She wanted to talk about advertising inside the AI giant's flagship product, ChatGPT: what it might look like, what guardrails should be in place, and what principles would make AI ads publicly defensible. Nearly 100 employees weighed in.

For years, OpenAI executives said the company wouldn't turn to ads for revenue. Altman referred to the idea as a "last resort." A year later, Altman hired Simo, a seasoned executive with a reputation for monetizing new products. In February, OpenAI began testing ads.

The drive to become more product-focused predated Simo, two people familiar with the company's internal strategy told Business Insider.

After ChatGPT took off in 2023, OpenAI leaders decided to put research teams in two buckets: one for improving products, and another centered on more forward-looking exploratory projects. In the years since, the company has faced more pressure to roll out products as competitors gained ground.

OpenAI had two broad goals in 2025, according to a former executive: reach a $12 billion revenue run rate, which it handily beat midway through the year, and "dominate in AI coding," which it did not. It was the first time the company had failed to meet a major internal objective, according to the person familiar with the goals.

Codex, OpenAI's coding tool, has since reached more than 2 million weekly active users, nearly four times as many as at the start of the year. Anthropic doesn't disclose active users; it said in February that Claude Code's run rate revenue is more than $2.5 billion, and its weekly active users had doubled since January 1.

OpenAI leadership realized it needed to start acting more like a Big Tech company, not a research lab. "There's definitely some stress happening to the company, and no company wants to be behind," one of the people familiar with the company's strategy said.

Since Simo joined, OpenAI has moved several executives into different roles, two people with knowledge of the shifts said.

A few months after she arrived, Kevin Weil moved from chief product officer to vice president of OpenAI for science, and VP of engineering Srinivas Narayanan became chief technical officer of B2B applications. In January, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap shifted to overseeing commercial operations, while Barret Zoph began overseeing B2B after he rejoined the company. Weil and Narayanan underwent title changes in September, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Simo has also personally recruited a number of high-level executives from across Big Tech, including former Facebook VP Vijaye Raji, Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and several executives from Amazon, Shopify, and Instagram, according to a person familiar with the leadership changes.

Since Simo started, the company's post-training team, which fine-tunes AI models after initial training, has acted as a bridge between research and product teams. The team interfaces directly with Simo about research projects, a person with knowledge of the organizational strategy said.

Early on, Simo told Business Insider, she did a "listening tour." More than 200 people took up her offer to meet, she said. That helped her better understand the company and culture and build trust with her new colleagues.

"I think that really made the company feel like I wasn't jumping in with preconceived notions," she said. "I was really trying to understand what was right for this company at this specific moment in time."

Simo said she manages the company's product research team alongside Mark Chen, the company's chief research officer. One of her first priorities was to understand how the research side operated, something she worked closely with Chen on.

As ChatGPT grows — it has nearly a billion weekly users — and its valuation surges, resources like compute power — the GPU chips, energy, and data-center capacity required to train and run AI models — have become increasingly competitive.

The tension between research and product has become increasingly visible inside OpenAI, some insiders say. Some researchers told Business Insider that the focus on user optimization and product growth risks narrowing the lab's ability to chase more exploratory work.

Earlier this year, vice president of research Jerry Tworek resigned after seven years at OpenAI, saying in a post on X that he wanted to "explore types of research that are hard to do at OpenAI."

Others have voiced similar frustrations. Tom Cunningham, the company's chief economist, left in December over friction between OpenAI's work on the economic impact of AI and the marketing of its product, Wired reported at the time.

One former researcher told Business Insider that as ChatGPT has grown, they "started feeling a little bit of pushback" from the rest of the company and began to feel as if "ambitious research" didn't have a place at the company anymore. Another former employee said the pivot towards a more traditional tech culture at OpenAI was "inevitable," but it has led to a "changing of the guard."

"At the end of the day, it's about survival," they said.

Chen has pushed back against claims that the company is driving a product-focused agenda. "The majority of our compute is allocated to foundational research and exploration — and not product milestones," he wrote on X in February.

Are we going to turn into Big Tech?

Simo was hired by OpenAI after serving on the board for more than a year.

Some employees, Simo told Business Insider, worried that her arrival meant OpenAI would transform into a Big Tech clone. "Is the only way to build this big product company to hire tons of people and kind of do what Big Tech is doing?" she recalled employees asking.

She spent her first few months trying to convince them that the answer was no.

One of her early moves was a company-wide effort to eliminate the unnecessary bureaucracy that can bog down a large organization. She publishes a monthly update on the company's Slack detailing obstacles that have been removed — everything from small annoyances like how to get headphones to bigger structural bottlenecks like clunky code reviews. She created a dedicated inbox where employees could flag issues and says she reads every submission.

"I'm very focused on scaling the company without creating the excess process and friction that many of us have seen in big tech," read an excerpt of her first dispatch.

Her aim, she said, is to keep OpenAI small, focused, and process-light. To that end, Simo said, OpenAI has an advantage that most Big Tech companies don't: It started as a research lab.

"There is no product if there is no research," Simo said. It's easier to build products on top of a strong research base than to put a research lab on top of a product-driven company, she added.

Big Tech would "put products out into the world and then kind of react to what would happen," Simo said. "We started with a research lab that was very focused on safety, and really thought of safety as a leading research field and not as the thing you do right before the launch."

"I think we have a very big advantage in how we think about problems and anticipating where the technology is going and feeling a lot of responsibility for guiding that technology towards the right place," she added.

Vivek Sharma, who worked under Simo at Meta, said that's a natural part of the maturation process in tech.

"Tension is a good sign someone is advancing beyond the basics," he said. "If there's no tension, no division happening — real expertise, experience, past multi-domain decisions haven't been made."

'Founder mode'

Simo isn't a traditional Silicon Valley insider. Raised in Sète, a fishing town on France's Mediterranean coast, she was the first in her family to graduate from high school before earning a place at one of France's elite business schools.

From there, she worked her way into tech — first through an internship at eBay, then at Facebook, where she went on to help monetize the company's core app and eventually oversee some of its most ambitious product expansions. She also served as CEO at Instacart, where she helped steer the company through the pandemic boom and took it public in 2023 during a notoriously difficult market for tech IPOs.

Simo married her high school sweetheart, former software engineer turned chocolatier Remy Miralles, in 2011; they have a young daughter. Simo has spoken in the past about how navigating chronic health issues, including endometriosis and the nervous system disorder POTS, has shaped some of her work. She cofounded a women's health venture called the Metrodora Institute and was largely responsible for the launch of ChatGPT Health.

Former colleagues describe Simo as intense, empathetic, and known to crack a joke during a high-stakes meeting.

They say that background shapes how she leads. Sharma described her as a "hard-charging" executive with a distinctly human lens — someone who thinks about what ordinary people would actually find useful, not just what's technologically impressive.

Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT who reports to Simo, said she has a "customer orientation" that has reshaped how the company approaches products. During an interview, he said that she has driven a new focus on reliability and performance over "flashy" new tech.

She also has a relentless operating tempo. Turley described it as her propensity to go "founder-mode."

"She will read every single document — including the links," he said.

Daniel Danker, who worked with Simo on Facebook's video team and later at Instacart, said "she was causing all of Facebook to move faster."

Simo's track record of commercialization is not without controversy.

At Facebook, she oversaw the company's video push, which later came under fire for inflating numbers. Facebook admitted in 2016 that it had overestimated how long viewers watched video ads by 60 to 80 percent; a lawsuit alleged the figure was as high as 900 percent. Facebook settled for $40 million while admitting no wrongdoing.

At Instacart, Simo inherited a fraught relationship with gig workers. On her first day as CEO in August 2021, she published an open letter pledging to be "a thoughtful and open partner" to the company's hundreds of thousands of gig workers, and invited them to email her directly.

The Gig Workers Collective, representing some 13,000 contract workers, called for a boycott and walkoff within weeks, telling Fortune that her responses were "basically canned answers."

OpenAI's next chapter

At OpenAI, Simo has helped push several high-profile initiatives, including a newsletter product called ChatGPT Pulse, OpenAI's Frontier enterprise agents, and advertising. This month, the company launched GPT-5.4, a model that incorporates coding capabilities into its core system, and announced a desktop "superapp," which Simo will oversee.

Simo said she approaches new product launches by involving employees throughout the process. She pitched those advertising roundtables by sharing her own ideas for what kind of ads the company could be proud of, and asking employees to share where they agreed and disagreed.

"The way I approached it was not to tell the company we're going to have ads. It's to actually start a dialogue," Simo told Business Insider. "That's not usually the way it goes. That's a big difference for this place."

As product chief, Simo has to prepare the company for battle inside a complex leadership structure, working closely with Altman.

Simo has said the two are complementary and aligned on vision, with Altman focusing heavily on research and compute scaling while she drives product execution.

It's a dynamic familiar to Simo, who worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg. She had a special talent for knowing how to navigate the CEO, Sharma said.

OpenAI can be a cutthroat place to work for leaders. As one former executive put it, OpenAI is such a rocket ship that there's very little time or patience for those who don't hit the ground running. "What a leader needs to do is astounding," the person said.

"The speed at which OpenAI is growing, it's relatively easy for Sam to hire the best, most famous people, but it's hard to keep them. His mode is: Nobody is not sacrificeable," the person said. "'You have to magically grow to what I think you can do right now.'"

OpenAI no longer has the luxury of being a research lab dreaming about the future of AI. It has rapidly become a global consumer product under intense scrutiny. Now Simo's job is to help it grow up without losing what made it successful in the first place.

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Scott Galloway never claimed to be an activist.

"I'm too lazy, selfish, socially minded," he told Business Insider on a February call about his unlikely leadership of two movements at once, both with Big Tech in the crosshairs. "I saw an opportunity for a new form of economic activism," he said, "but I'm a long way from being a Cesar Chavez or refusing to give up my bus seat."

Later in our call, he analogizes his "Resist and Unsubscribe" initiative — which urges Americans to unsubscribe from Big Tech to protest the Trump Administration's immigration crackdown — to the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycotts. At one point, he calls activists "more noble" than himself. Seconds later, he describes not wanting to "get on a call with a bunch of people in Birkenstocks."

I asked his cohost, Kara Swisher, the same question: Is Scott an activist? Not in a traditional sense, she texted me, or he would have formed a coalition. "I got a lot of pings from people who do organizing that this was a dumb way to do it," Swisher wrote. "It wasn't."

If you don't know Galloway's name, you've certainly seen his clips. The executive-turned-professor-turned-podcaster rakes in millions from his center-left media empire, including four podcasts, two newsletters, and six books, the latest about how young men are socially and economically disadvantaged, thanks in part to Big Tech. He's a sort of shock jock for the TikTok age — and his 400,000 followers there love it.

In recent months, his anti-Big Tech efforts have made him an even bigger lightning rod. He's been disinvited from two speaking gigs, he said, because the hosts didn't "want controversy." (He declined to share which gigs: "I'm hoping they invite me next year.") He's also heard from CEOs or chief marketing officers of 20% of the companies he's targeted, he said, who have mostly been kind. He says he's disappointed because he wishes they felt more threatened.

It's a surprising turn for the serial entrepreneur and business school professor. He's a provocateur, a testosterone-injecting multimillionaire who students call a "dick." Is this the man who can move the masses to quit Amazon Prime cold turkey?

Galloway is a businessman at heart. Even his activism is done through the market.

After federal agents killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Galloway launched his Resist and Unsubscribe campaign. The best way to catch President Donald Trump's attention, he reasoned, was the market. Since, he said, corporations were providing the "data, infrastructure, and logistics" to assist with Trump's immigration crackdown, it was time for Americans to vote with their dollars.

He wanted to walk the walk — and that meant cutting his own subscriptions. He quickly found that he'd been paying for some duplicates: four Apple TV Plus accounts, three ChatGPT subscriptions. He had four AT&T contracts, of which "three are for Blackberrys and iPads that have been in landfills for the last decade," he told me.

The Galloway family also found some workarounds. His son found a "probably illegal" way to watch the Premier League without Paramount+. He binge-watched "Heated Rivalry" before dumping HBO Max. The hardest app to give up was Uber, which he said on his podcast was costing him $34,000 a year.

On stock ownership, Galloway is more mixed. He's hesitant to sell his Amazon shares while the stock is down, but he said he did sell down almost all of his Apple shares.

"I'm especially offended, personally, by Tim Cook," he said. Galloway said that Cook paints himself as a "soft, gentle, nice guy" while sucking up to Trump at the "Melania" premiere. ("I'm not a political person on either side," Cook recently told Good Morning America.)

He plans to move his money out of Goldman Sachs and is debating whether to choose a regional US bank or the Royal Bank of Canada.

If you're worried that you can't fully unsubscribe, he gets it.

"I don't have entire moral clarity around this," Galloway said. "I still have an iPhone, and I'm not giving it up."

As February came to a close, Galloway felt contented. Resist and Unsubscribe had hit 23 million views on social media and 2 million unique site visits, he said. An estimate on his website shows how much market capitalization the movement would wipe out if 5% of visitors canceled two subscriptions. As of this story's publication date, it calculated just over $281 million in losses.

When Galloway first started talking about the plight facing America's young men five years ago, it produced a "gag reflex," he said. People compared him to manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and accused him of misogyny.

Galloway has said that young men are more economically and socially disadvantaged than young women. He points to the stats. Young men account for only 42% of students at four-year universities, and 63% of young men are single. "If you go into a morgue and there are five people who died by suicide, four are men," he said.

His book, "Notes on Being a Man," published in November, is a how-to guide for the disenfranchised young man in your life. Of course, young people are reading for pleasure less and less. His most encouraging feedback comes from mothers, Galloway said.

The book has also received plenty of criticism. In her review in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter writes that Galloway thinks "men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, but just not as much as before."

Galloway seemed taken aback. "I think that's a total misinterpretation of what I've written about," he said. Those on the left — which he groups The New Yorker into — seemed to think that young men don't have problems, he said. "They are the problem."

"We have decided, in the social hierarchy, young men are less deserving of empathy than women," Galloway said.

Galloway also faced misogyny accusations from women online after calling himself a "'50s dad" who wasn't sure if there should be mandatory paternity leave. He said that dads are a "waste of time" in the first few months of a child's life, and that their only jobs are to keep babies from drowning and "make sure moms don't lose it." In The New York Times, Jessica Grose called it "loud and wrong."

On this subject, Galloway was more remorseful. "The comments on paternity leave were meant to be funny," he said. "They weren't. It was stupid, and so far I've paid a fairly significant reputational price."

He was less sympathetic to the Times, which he said "made a cartoon out of my comments so that they could play guardians of gotcha."

Stirring up controversy has long been part of Galloway's brand. Why not double down?

"I try to be provocative, I try to be funny, I try to say what I'm thinking," he told me. "Against paternity leave? No, that's absolutely not the message I want to communicate."

It's easy to think that Galloway hates Big Tech to the bone.

Tech is the target of both of his movements. He accuses the industry of helping to push young men down; in his book, he analogizes Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg to heroin dealers standing outside a middle school. Then, for Resist and Unsubscribe, he asks you to stop paying these companies entirely.

Indeed, on our call, Galloway spared no barbs for the tech CEOs. "I don't think there's any way feasible that he could be described as a good person," he said of Zuckerberg.

But the tech industry is full of his friends, his former coworkers, and the people who made him rich. Galloway is an entrepreneur, after all; he made (some of) his millions on the sale of the business intelligence firm, L2. He wrote a book about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which he called a "love letter."

Of the executives targeted by Resist and Unsubscribe, Galloway said that half are acquaintances, a quarter are "friendly" with him, and one or two are friends. "I find that they're, on the whole, good people," he said of tech executives.

That's what makes his shift to organizing so surprising. He's not raging against an industry from the outside; he could well be part of the in-crowd if he wanted to. He was a successful business executive with a vengeful spirit, then a snarky podcaster — and now a man trying to save the world.

Galloway said that humans are "net gainers" from Big Tech — but that we're also net gainers from pesticides and fossil fuels. What's Big Tech's emission? "Rage," he said.

Pesticides and fossil fuels are regulated by the government. For tech, we often rely on a benevolent CEO, Galloway said. He's not sure they exist anymore.

"If we're waiting on the better angels of Mark Zuckerberg to show up, don't hold your breath," he said.