Something’s going on at OpenAI — and it isn’t just the pre-IPO jitters.
According to Bloomberg, the company behind ChatGPT is sending not just one, but two top executives away on extended medical leave.
The company’s chief marketing officer Kate Rouch is reportedly stepping down to recover from cancer, the publication reports, though she’ll have a contingency in place to make limited returns to the office if her health allows.
And Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of artificial general intelligence development — and arguably one of the AI company’s most important cogs — is taking medical leave. Simo ultimately plans to return to her position, but will be gone for several weeks to find treatment for a neuroimmune condition.
On top of all that, the company’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap is also being shuffled into a new role. According to Bloomberg, Lightcap will be the new special projects lead, forcing the chief revenue officer to take up some of his previous COO work.
If your head is spinning, just imagine what it’s like inside OpenAI’s hermetically sealed offices. The company has recently jettisoned some of its banner projects like Sora — the AI video generation model which included a massive partnership with Disney — while it juggles major bottlenecks with its data center buildout.
Against that chaotic backdrop, the company has begun an all-out push to go public, though it remains to be seen how its now thoroughly reshuffled executive branch handles the pressure.
In a statement to Bloomberg, the company insisted it has a “strong leadership team focused on our biggest priorities: advancing frontier research, growing our global user base of nearly one billion users, and powering enterprise use cases. We’re well-positioned to keep executing with continuity and momentum.”
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