• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sends a lot of messages.
• Altman said that he messages "a few hundred" OpenAI employees a day.
• Overall, he said that he's "definitely not a hands-on manager."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has a very direct way to get his message across.

In a conversation with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Altman said that he messages "a few hundred" OpenAI employees a day between texts, Slack, and other media.

"Very quick, like one, two messages, whatever, not done by an agent," Altman said during an appearance at Stripe Sessions. "I actually do it. And the context I get from that sometimes is very helpful in these diffuse ways."

Asked about Altman's habits, ChatGPT said, "That's a lot—but not implausible for someone in his position." Rough napkin math suggests that Altman is sending somewhere around 39,000 messages a year, and that's limited to a five-day workweek. (Forbes reported earlier this year that Altman likes to spend his time at the Napa Valley ranch, which is out of cell service range.)

Altman has said repeatedly that he loathes Slack. He told Collison that it's hard to imagine a world without such instant messaging.

"Like many other people, I hate Slack, but I can't imagine having to still communicate via email or whatever we used to do," he said.

As for his overall management style, Altman said that he's "definitely not a hands-on manager."

"I'm very much of this style that you get great people, kind of give them a very high-level thing to point at and try to let stuff just happen," he said.

Altman said OpenAI is about to enter its third era, after going from a research lab chasing AGI to also developing consumer products.

"Now we have to, in addition to both of those two things, figure out how to build this like mega, mega scale token factory for the world," he said.

This new, massive undertaking will require a different skill set.

"The thing that I didn't really appreciate between the phase one, phase two shift was how much my management style had to change," he said. "Running a research lab and running a product company are two extremely different things. And I suspect this third phase is going to be very different yet again."

Altman said he'll ultimately have to change or surround himself with more people — perhaps, AI could bridge the gap.

"I think it's not going to be like a natural fit for my management style," he said. "So I either have to find someone or a few people great to hire, or I have to figure out how to do things in a different way, or I have to build an AI that can manage this new thing."

• OpenAI included a line in Codex's instructions restricting references to goblins, gremlins, trolls, and ogres.
• The company explained in a blog post that mythical creatures have crept into answers since GPT-5.1.
• The goblin references were incentivized while building ChatGPT's "Nerdy" personality, OpenAI wrote.

OpenAI has been in "goblin mode" for months.

On Monday, one X user pointed out an unusual line in Codex's personality guide. The instructions tell Codex to have a "vivid inner life," a "good ear" — and to get out of fairytale land.

"Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query," the source code reads.

The sentence appears four times in the code.

Two days later, OpenAI posted a blog post titled: "Where the goblins came from." The mythical creatures had been growing in prominence since the November launch of GPT 5.1, the company wrote.

The culprit seems to be the "Nerdy" personality option for ChatGPT. The personality's training incentivized references to mythical creatures, OpenAI wrote.

OpenAI retired the "Nerdy" personality in March, but GPT-5.5 was trained before it noticed the issue. The company noticed it especially in its AI coding agent. "Codex is, after all, quite nerdy," it wrote.

The goblin moment is a "powerful example of how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways," it wrote.

How OpenAI's goblin code turned into a meme

In the prior days before the line of code was spotted, some users posted screenshots of their conversations with GPT 5.5, including references to these mythical creatures.

"Why is gpt5.5 so obsessed with goblins," asked one user on X, who posted screenshots showing the AI recommending a particular type of camera equipment "if you want filthy neon sparkle goblin mode." Another example showed the AI referencing "goblin bandwidth" or giving "an even shorter goblin version" of its answer.

Repo Prompt founder Eric Provencher posted on X that GPT 5.5 said, "I'll keep babysitting it rather than leave a little perf gremlin running unattended." An OpenAI engineer responded: "I thought we fixed this sorry."

The AI evaluation website Arena.ai also found an increase in GPT 5.5's usage of the words goblin, gremlin, and troll. The increase was especially noticeable when not using high-thinking mode, Arena found.

Since the line was spotted, OpenAI's goblin instruction has spun out into a meme. X users posted screenshots of their conversations, prompting about goblins and gremlins.

Many users online referenced the term "goblin mode." Defined as "a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy," the term was Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year in 2022.

OpenAI also got in on the jokes. ChatGPT included the line in its bio on X. Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux posted the line with the shortening "If you know, you know."

Citrini Research shook the market in February with a Substack post about the future of the economy with AI. The research outfit had a more negative outlook on the goblin saga, calling OpenAI's response "insane."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman chimed in, first with a meme about asking for "extra goblins" in GPT-6. Then he wrote that Codex was having a ChatGPT moment, before correcting himself.

"I meant a goblin moment, sorry," Altman wrote.

• Elon Musk boosted a New Yorker profile questioning OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's trustworthiness on X.
• The article appeared on X feeds on Monday, the same day Musk and Altman's trial kicked off in Oakland.
• Musk's lawsuit claims Altman deceived him on OpenAI's mission as a nonprofit.

A New Yorker magazine investigation detailing concerns about Sam Altman's leadership resurfaced on X feeds on Monday, at the behest of the social media platform's billionaire owner.

A post from Ronan Farrow, an investigative reporter, linking to his New Yorker profile of the OpenAI CEO titled "Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?" showed up on the X "For You" page for some users on Monday, three weeks after it was initially posted on April 6.

The post was labeled as "Boosted" and said, "This organic post was boosted by @elonmusk."

It's unclear how many people were served the post on Monday, but several Business Insider reporters saw it in their feeds.

The profile was boosted as a high-stakes trial between Musk and Altman kicked off in Oakland, California, on Monday. Altman made an unexpected appearance in court as jury selection began. Musk was not in attendance.

Musk sued Altman and OpenAI in 2024, alleging he was deceived when he cofounded the company in 2015 and invested tens of millions of dollars, only for it to abandon its mission as a public benefit nonprofit. The case could cost billions for OpenAI, which is preparing for an IPO.

Musk went after Altman directly on Monday in a critical post on X.

"Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop," he wrote, referring to Altman and OpenAI's president, who is also named in the lawsuit.

OpenAI said Monday the lawsuit was "a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor."

X did not respond to a request for comment or questions about the "boosted" feature, including how it works and how it compares to an advertising post, which is typically labeled "Ad."

The New Yorker declined to comment.

• Sam Altman showed up in court as jury selection began in a civil trial between him and Elon Musk.
• Some potential jurors offered unfavorable views about AI — and Musk.
• Musk sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an unexpected appearance in a California courtroom Monday as jury selection in his high-stakes legal feud with Elon Musk kicked off.

Altman, who wore a dark-colored suit and white shirt, was spotted inside the Oakland courtroom, where some potential jurors in the federal civil trial shared unfavorable views about artificial intelligence — and Musk, the world's richest man.

"Elon doesn't care about people, just like our president," one prospective juror told US District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

The man, who works in construction and described himself as a "meme junky" and a "dying breed" who still gets print newspaper subscriptions, added that he thinks Musk only cares about money.

Another prospective juror who works for the city of Oakland said he has a strong opinion about Musk. He said that he would do his "best" to approach the case without bias, even though he called Musk a "jerk" in a pre-trial jury questionnaire.

Musk was not in attendance for day one of the trial between two of the tech industry's most powerful billionaires. Since it is a civil trial, the parties are not required to appear unless they are testifying. Up until now, Musk and Altman have largely left the matter to their lawyers, aside from the occasional online jab.

The Tesla CEO sued OpenAI, Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman two years ago, alleging that they intentionally "deceived" him into cofounding the company with them in 2015.

Musk alleges in his lawsuit that he poured tens of millions into OpenAI to support its founding mission as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the public's benefit, only for that mission to later be abandoned, in part, through the company's partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft is also named as a defendant in Musk's lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks more than $100 billion in damages, along with sweeping changes to the structure of the $850 billion company behind ChatGPT. The case comes as OpenAI is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering.

Earlier Monday, Musk and OpenAI traded barbs on Musk's X platform about the case, with Musk referring to Altman as "Scam Altman" and OpenAI ripping Musk's lawsuit as a "baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor."

Musk is expected to testify in the weeks-long trial, along with Altman and other tech execs like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Some potential jurors questioned on Monday told the court that they had reservations surrounding AI.

A registered nurse said she doesn't trust AI and isn't a fan of how the rapidly advancing technology is being used in the workplace.

"It's just giving me more work to do," said the woman who explained that her employer uses AI tools to process patient records that she still has to review for errors.

One woman who works in the psychiatric patient care unit at Stanford University said she had some concerns about AI but could approach the case with an open mind.

"I personally don't use it much because I do find that I have to double check everything, and at this point, I might as well do it myself," said the woman, who was ultimately chosen to sit on the jury.

A different juror prospect, a PhD student in genetics, said she has a ChatGPT subscription and uses it, along with Anthropic's Claude, to write code and emails.

Concerns of the juror prospects were also reflected outside the courthouse, where protesters gathered to demonstrate against AI. A person in a robot suit wore a sign that said, "Altman's AI enslaver." A giant inflatable tube figure read: "Elon sucks."

By the end of Monday, nine jurors were selected for the trial. Opening arguments are set to begin Tuesday.

At one point, Musk's attorney, Steven Molo, asked the judge to dismiss a juror prospect who called Musk a "greedy, racist, homophobic piece of garbage" in her questionnaire and another who wrote that Musk is a "world-class jerk."

"Look, the reality is that people don't like him," the judge told Musk's legal team about their client. "But that doesn't mean that Americans, nevertheless, can't have integrity for the judicial process."

• OpenAI has a new safety-focused fellowship program.
• The announcement came hours after a report questioned CEO Sam Altman's commitment to AI safety.
• OpenAI said fellows will receive roughly $15,000 worth of compute per month.

OpenAI is making compute resources a core part of its sales pitch for a new safety fellowship.

According to the application, OpenAI will dedicate approximately $15,000 in compute per month to its first AI safety fellows, who will work alongside members of the frontier lab's safety team.

Compute has long been a key barometer of cache for leading tech and AI companies. Recently, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he would be "deeply alarmed" if an engineer earning $500,000 didn't use the equivalent of $250,000 in AI tokens.

The OpenAI fellowship runs from September 14, 2026, through February 5, 2027, and pays a weekly stipend of $3,850. Based on that amount, the yearly equivalent salary would be over $200,000 pretax, excluding likely holidays. In total, fellows will make over $111,000.

The announcement also came hours after The New Yorker published a lengthy expose questioning Altman's trustworthiness, based on interviews with more than 100 people who have direct experience with the OpenAI CEO, as well as never-before-published notes compiled by OpenAI cofounder Sutskever and now-Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

One key reasons some people question Altman's leadership is OpenAI's handling of safety-related issues. In one part of the story, journalists Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz recount how OpenAI disbanded a "superalignment team" that was supposed to investigate one of the most pressing issues facing AI: whether AI models could deceive testers only to pursue their own ends once actually deployed.

In the announcement, OpenAI said they want external researchers, engineers, and practitioners to pursue rigorous, high-impact research on the safety and alignment of advanced AI systems." The company also highlighted a handful of priority areas for fellows to focus on.

"Priority areas include safety evaluation, ethics, robustness, scalable mitigations, privacy-preserving safety methods, agentic oversight, and high-severity misuse domains, among others," the announcement said.

OpenAI's program closely mirrors rival Anthropic, which already has established a "Fellows Program for AI safety research." In December, Anthropic announced two new groups for May and July of 2026. OpenAI's benefits are also the same as the Anthropic program: a $3,850 weekly stipend and compute resources of roughly $15,000 per month.

"This year, we plan to work with more fellows across a wider range of safety research areas—including scalable oversight, adversarial robustness and AI control, model organisms, mechanistic interpretability, AI security, and model welfare," Anthropic said in a statement when it announced its next round of the fellowship in December.

Amodei cofounded alongside six former OpenAI employees after growing frustrated about the direction of the company. Anthropic recently weakened a core safety pledge, but Amodei and its top leadership have positioned the AI startup as intently focused on safety.

Other leading tech companies and AI labs, including Google DeepMind and Microsoft, offer broader-focused AI fellowships.

• In October, Sam Altman said "erotica for adults" was coming to ChatGPT.
• Now those plans are reportedly being mothballed.
• It's fine for young startups and even mature companies to try out new ideas. But OpenAI and Altman are trying out a lot.

Last fall, Sam Altman told us he was about to bring spicy chat — "erotica for adults," in his words — to ChatGPT.

That never happened, and now it looks like it never will: Altman's OpenAI has put those plans on hold "indefinitely," per the Financial Times.

This is Altman's second big walkback in the last few days. Earlier this week, the company canned Sora, the briefly popular video app it rolled out last fall. I've asked the company for comment.

Both retreats are supposed to be part of a new push at OpenAI to focus the company's efforts on things that could make money today, as it preps for an IPO at the same time it faces real competition from the likes of Google and Anthropic.

So all this starting and stopping could be viewed as necessary growing pains at a fast-growing tech company — ones that won't mean anything in the long run, if it delivers on its world-changing ambitions.

Not only that, but Altman told us we should expect this sort of stuff. "Please expect a very high rate of change from us," he wrote last fall, after hearing from content owners who were outraged to find their stuff on Sora without their permission. "We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly."

It's not that companies aren't allowed to make wrong turns and head up dead ends as they grow up, and even once they're fully mature. That kind of pivoting is celebrated in tech (and is why very few people are mad that Mark Zuckerberg has stopped telling us the metaverse is the future, or that Google once bought Motorola and decided that was a bad idea a couple years later.)

But "move fast and break things" lands differently when the company doing the moving and breaking isn't running a photo app or playing around with crypto.

Instead, OpenAI and its competitors say they're leading us into a world where everything — the way we live and work (or don't work) and fight wars and everything else — will change in fundamental ways.

And investors have bought this pitch, which means our economy now seems yoked to all this — which means all of us are yoked to it, even if we never touch a chatbot.

Which makes me slightly queasy to see Sam Altman promise dirty chats in October, and then walk away from the plan less than six months later.

Not because dirty chat is obviously absurd. Lots of people in AI think romantic or sexual chatbot conversations are a real use case and could be a real business.

But the reasons it might be a bad idea for OpenAI were pretty obvious from the start. It's a giant, heavily scrutinized company that wants to be treated as central and indispensable, and it's only going to get more scrutiny.

If those objections only became real after Altman floated the idea in public, that's not charming startup experimentation. It's a sign that OpenAI is still making itself up as it goes. And that would be easier to shrug off if the rest of us weren't already being told to build our lives, jobs, and businesses around what OpenAI says comes next.

• Goodbye, Sora!
• I loved you at first — it was so much fun making silly videos of my friends.
• After a few days, I got bored and moved on. Apparently so did everyone else.

Goodnight, sweet Sora. You were a wonderful tool for trolling my friends, but you burned too bright (and used too much compute) to stay around in this harsh world.

For a brief moment, I absolutely loved Sora. I loved making silly videos of my friends and me. I loved that I could use my friend's face to put them in ridiculous situations, like falling over while roller-skating at their desk, experiencing gastric distress, or singing in a ska band.

I was addicted to making these, churning them out, often starting a new one while waiting for the previous one to render, and sometimes hitting the hourly limit that OpenAI had to impose after some people (oops) were burning through all that free compute. I drained my phone battery by midday.

But a few days after its initial launch, the small handful of my friends and colleagues who had any interest in joining had already joined. None of my normal friends who didn't work in tech or media had any interest in this at all and found it fairly unpleasant.

Also, I couldn't help notice that on the feed of videos, there seemed to be very few women using the app, or at least allowing others to make videos featuring their likenesses. That makes sense; women's experience on the internet has rightfully informed them that it would be a very bad idea to allow strangers to make videos with your face. What I discovered was that Sora had a pervert problem: Although nudity or sexual content was banned, people were making non-nude fetish content like feet videos with random women's likenesses.

Now, OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it will be shutting down Sora, its stand-alone video generation app, and its deal with Disney is dead. An OpenAI spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is focusing its resources on other parts of the business. It seems that Sora was one of the "side quests" that was a distraction and a drain on compute.

Sora became a bore-a

Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the novelty had worn off. I rarely opened the app after the second week.

This was, I imagine, a problem: making videos of yourself is fun, but watching videos that strangers make of themselves is not fun. The idea of a social feed of AI-generated videos is simply not something that people are interested in. Around the same time, Meta also tried this with an app of AI videos, and it was even more boring.

The last few years have taught us that humans — myself included — have a nearly endless capacity to watch an algorithmic feed of vertical short-form videos. However, it seems clear that this only applies to human-made content: videos of people putting on makeup, dancing in their kitchens, lip-syncing, debating, whatever. A social feed of AI video simply doesn't work.

I am not sure that OpenAI was truly trying to create a successful social video feed; it seems more likely that this was a small experimental effort that ran its course and they're moving on.

I'll miss Sora in the way I miss something like ChatRoulette or BeReal: It was really fun for a short time, and then not at all, and I have zero desire to ever revisit.

Rest in peace, Sora — and thanks for the stupid memories.

• OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent wars, data reviewed by Business Insider shows.
• Workers often leave Big Tech for Sam Altman's venture and then move on to smaller startups.
• The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

Workers leave Big Tech for OpenAI. They fan out across a growing ecosystem of startups. Rinse and repeat.

Since it launched ChatGPT, the Sam Altman-led company has quickly become a magnet for AI talent. It has pulled hundreds of researchers and engineers from competitors like Google, Meta, and Apple, according to data reviewed by Business Insider. After sticking around for a while, many of those employees go on to found or join rival startups of their own.

The company has nearly quadrupled in size since its chatbot took off in 2023, scaling from a small research lab of around 1,000 employees to a tech company with more than 4,000 workers.

To get a sense of how OpenAI is faring in the race for AI talent, Business Insider analyzed findings from workforce intelligence provider Live Data Technologies, which used LinkedIn to track the comings and goings of around 1,300 employees from January 2023 to March 2026.

Live Data Technologies analyzed publicly available professional profile data for OpenAI employees who had available information on previous employers. The roles analyzed ranged from engineering and research to product, human resources, and recruiting.

Representatives for OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment.

The company's hiring pipeline is highly concentrated

OpenAI was originally founded by Altman and Elon Musk in 2015 to compete with Google's DeepMind AI lab.

Now, Google is the No. 1 source of talent for OpenAI, accounting for roughly a quarter of hires, according to the data.

Nearly half of OpenAI hires in the last three years came from either Google, Meta, Apple, or Microsoft.

Apple's Jony Ive joined OpenAI last summer to work on a new AI device. The project encompasses around 300 workers, many of whom came from Apple, The Information reported earlier this year.

The company has also made several high-profile hires over the past year, including Slack CEO Denise Dresser, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo.

Since 2023, OpenAI has added roughly four times as many engineers as it has lost, highlighting the company's rapid expansion as the AI race intensifies.

The battle for AI talent has become one of Silicon Valley's fiercest. Big Tech companies are aggressively competing for a relatively small pool of researchers capable of building advanced AI systems.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly taken a hands-on role in recruiting top AI employees, while Meta and other companies have reportedly offered massive compensation packages, sometimes valued in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in stock.

OpenAI is known for its high compensation packages. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that its employees receive an average of $1.5 million in stock-based compensation. Public salary data from H-1B visa applications shows that research scientists at the AI venture have salaries ranging from $245,000 to $685,000, while engineering roles are listed with a range of $165,000 to $290,000.

Where employees go after OpenAI tells a different story

Departures are fragmented, spreading across more than 150 different companies, including competitors like Meta, Anthropic, and emerging labs such as Thinking Machines Lab, according to the data. The majority of OpenAI employees left for smaller startups, venture capital firms, or academia, according to the data.

The data suggests OpenAI has become a centerpiece in the AI talent network, pulling researchers from Big Tech and sending alumni across the startup and VC ecosystem.

Only a handful of companies received more than 15 OpenAI alumni in the last three years: Anthropic, Meta, Google, and Thinking Machines Lab, the data shows.

Anthropic is perhaps the best-known example. It was founded by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei. VP of Research Max Schwarzer left OpenAI for Anthropic earlier this month.

Meanwhile, several OpenAI employees who left the company to help found Thinking Machine Labs in February, including Barret Zoph, rejoined OpenAI earlier this year.

Common roles at OpenAI include engineering and research, the data shows. The average tenure for US-based OpenAI employees is around 16 months.

Do you work for OpenAI or have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at gkay@businessinsider.com or Signal at 248-894-6012. Use a personal email address, a nonwork device, and nonwork WiFi; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• If the AI boom ends up a bust, it won't be nearly as brutal as the dot-com crash, Igor Pejic says.
• The "Tech Money" author said Big Tech's self-reliance, varied businesses, and deep pockets help.
• However, he said the rise of index funds means a market slump would have widespread impacts.

If the AI boom collapses, it won't be as catastrophic as the dot-com crash — but the shockwave will be felt far and wide, Igor Pejic says.

The banker and author of a new guide for tech investors titled "Tech Money" told Business Insider this week that Big Tech's unprecedented dominance will limit the magnitude of any market decline.

Pejic underscored the greater "stickiness" of companies like Alphabet and Microsoft compared to the leading companies of the past, such as Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and IBM.

Big Tech companies have remained dominant for decades partly because of their platform models, which give them "almost limitless pricing power" and make them "almost impossible to dislodge," he said.

In other words, they've become powerfully entrenched by attracting so many users, app developers, hardware suppliers, advertisers, and other parties to their ecosystems over time. Now they can easily hike their fees, and new market entrants struggle to capture any market share from them.

Pejic also pointed out that Apple, Meta, and their peers have successfully navigated multiple technological shifts, such as moving from desktop computers to mobile devices and from on-premises IT equipment to cloud hosting.

Big Tech companies also throw off gobs of cash, enabling them to place several big bets at once, and fund their investments instead of relying on costly external financing. Pejic described that as a "moat" against rivals, especially in an AI race characterized by "tremendous infrastructure costs."

Shades of the past

Pejic drew several parallels between the AI boom and the dot-com bubble. The similarities include a game-changing technology, partnerships and financing deals between key players, the buildout of network infrastructure, and "extreme" valuations, he said.

Yet Pejic said an AI crash would "not be as devastating as the dot-com bubble when it burst."

Any market sell-off will be briefer and less severe because today's tech giants have highly profitable core businesses, he said, meaning their stock prices won't collapse completely if their AI bets flop.

They're also less likely to suffer a cash crunch or trigger a financial crisis given their limited reliance on bank funding, and investors have been more discerning about which AI stocks they buy versus rushing to own any business with ".com" in its name, he said.

Pejic did raise some concerns, including the fact that so many companies are spending huge amounts to build the best AI model possible, but the market can probably only support a few of them in the end.

He also flagged the immense amount of investor cash riding on a handful of tech stocks, given the rise of index funds that own indexes such as the S&P 500, which is weighted by market capitalization and thus intensely concentrated in the Magnificent Seven.

"It's very difficult to find a place to hide if this really goes down," Pejic said. "If you're keeping your money in the stock market and AI goes down, it will affect everything."

He noted that risk will only become greater as AI giants such as OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic go public and join the index, increasing everyday investors' exposure to AI.

Pejic said owning Big Tech stocks was "perhaps the safest way" to profit from AI, given their self-reliance, vast resources, and diversified businesses, which should limit their downside and insulate them from industry shocks such as the emergence of DeepSeek.

For example, he praised Apple's approach of refraining from spending hundreds of billions on microchips and data centers, in favor of seeing how the AI race plays out, and partnering with peers or buying in capabilities to harness the tech.

Apple might not be the "most exciting company," but for investors, owning it is a "clever and quite safe strategy without burning too much cash," he said.

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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• Sam Altman said AI would in the future be sold like electricity and water, metered by usage.
• "We see a future where intelligence is a utility," the OpenAI CEO said.
• Altman suggested demand is surging and compute will decide who gets access.

In the future, you could have another utility bill to pay for: artificial intelligence.

That's according to Sam Altman, who says AI will eventually be bought and sold as a basic utility like electricity and water that's metered by usage.

Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, the OpenAI CEO said tech companies like his are building toward a future where intelligence is delivered on demand.

"Fundamentally our business and I think the business of every other model provider is going to look like selling tokens," Altman said, referring to the units AI systems use to process and price input and output data.

"We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for," he added.

In that world, compute capacity determines who gets access — and demand for AI is only going up, Altman said. Compute capacity is the processing power required to train and run AI models, determined by infrastructure such as chips and data centers.

If OpenAI doesn't build enough compute capacity to meet demand, Altman said, it either "can't sell it or the price gets really high." That would push AI access toward the wealthy, or force governments to decide how limited compute should be distributed, he said.

The infrastructure sprint

Major tech companies are set to spend hundreds of billions of dollars this year on compute to meet soaring demand for AI.

In her keynote at CES 2026 in January, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the world will need more than "10 yottaflops" of compute — a scale 10,000 times larger than global AI capacity in 2022 — over the next five years to keep up with growth.

Powering that expansion is a significant infrastructure challenge.

AI data centers can consume as much electricity as small cities, and the strain on the US power grid — along with transformer shortages and slow permitting for transmission lines — could become a bottleneck.

In an episode of the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast in January, Elon Musk said that electricity generation is now the limiting factor in scaling AI, predicting China could outpace the US in total AI compute because of its faster energy build-out.

Inside tech companies, compute is a valuable but sometimes scarce resource. Engineers are competing for access to GPUs, and some job candidates now ask about their AI compute budget alongside salary and equity.

Last December, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said the company, which has committed roughly $1.4 trillion on data center projects over the next eight years, wants "to be ahead of the curve," but said, "I don't think we will be, no matter how ambitious we can dream of being right now."

At the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit, Altman said the goal is to move away from a world of being "capacity constrained."