“I would say the thing that I don’t think we did well at Meta is actually anticipating the risks that our products would create in society,” Simo told Wired. “At OpenAI, these risks are very real.”
Meta did not respond immediately to Fortune’s request for comment.
Simo worked for a decade at Meta, all while it was still known as Facebook, from 2011 to July 2021. For her last two-and-a-half years, she headed the Facebook app.
One of Simo’s first initiatives at OpenAI was mental health, the 40-year-old told Wired. The other initiative she was tasked with was launching the company’s AI certification program to help bolster workers’ AI skills in a competitive job market and trying to smooth AI’s disruption within the company.
“So it is a very big responsibility, but it’s one that I feel like we have both the culture and the prioritization to really address up-front,” Simo said.
When joining the tech giant, Simo said that just by looking at the landscape, she immediately realized mental health needed to be addressed.
Simo said she must navigate an “uncharted” path to address these mental health concerns, adding there’s an inherent risk to OpenAI constantly rolling out different features.
“Every week new behaviors emerge with features that we launch where we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s another safety challenge to address,’” Simo told Wired.
Still, doing the right thing every single time is exceptionally hard,” Simo said, due to the sheer volume of users (800 million per week). “So what we’re trying to do is catch as much as we can of the behaviors that are not ideal and then constantly refine our models.”
