Simo will transition from her top job at Instacart “over the next few months” and join OpenAI “later this year,” according to a company blog post.
“I think with AI, we’re going to have way more ability to connect a lot more data, to mine that data to find better insights, and then to use those insights to tell people how to change their behavior,” she told Fortune.
“At meetings, it was just me plus old, retired fishermen,” she said.
While Simo proved her success as a businesswoman over the years, OpenAI’s desire to bring her on to lead AI applications makes more sense when you consider her passion for applying artificial intelligence to health care.
“In 2020, I was kind of falling apart from head to toe,” she said. “That seemed very terrifying that I would be diagnosed with a chronic illness—that’s incurable—and that there was pretty much no research being done to explain the biology behind these conditions. So I set out to create Metrodora, which is essentially the idea of partnering with patients to enroll them in research and gather all the 360 data points on them. We look at their genetics, we look at their immune profiling, we look at their reported symptoms, we look at their environment.”
Simo said she believes the current health care system that treats people “as a set of body organs” is not well-suited to treat chronic diseases because “all of these systems interact together.”
“You go to a cardiologist for your heart, and the gynecologist thinks you’re just a giant walking uterus,” she said at the MPW conference. “The beauty of AI is in the past, these data sets were very siloed, and even if you wanted to analyze a ton of genomics data, that was a huge endeavor that could take many months, let alone if you wanted to do it across all the data points I mentioned. But now, because we have these tools that allow us to analyze giant data sets, we’re going to be able to understand patterns we couldn’t understand before.”
While OpenAI hasn’t specified the projects Simo will work on once she joins the company as CEO of Applications, company boss Altman did say she will “focus on enabling our ‘traditional’ company functions to scale as we enter a next phase of growth.”
“This organization has the potential of accelerating human potential at a pace never seen before,” Simo said in a statement, which Altman re-shared in a blog post. “I am deeply committed to shaping these applications toward the public good.”
