OpenAI’s Big Hire; Farming Robots Seed New Startups, Despite Setbacks

Before we get into today’s column, OpenAI late Wednesday evening announced the hire of Fidji Simo, currently the Instacart CEO and a member of OpenAI’s board, in the newly created position of CEO of OpenAI Applications, to run “the product, business, and other company functions,” reporting to CEO Sam Altman. (My colleagues Jessica Lessin and Amir Efrati had early word of the appointment). 

The hire emphasizes the scope of Altman’s ambitions for OpenAI. Simo’s extensive experience running an e-commerce and advertising business at Instacart and leading the Facebook app will prove helpful as OpenAI expands into new areas beyond chatbots, such as applications, advertising and commerce.

There are still some unanswered questions, including who succeeds Simo at Instacart, the grocery delivery firm with a market capitalization of $12 billion. Instacart said Thursday that Simo would stay on as chair of the board and she would be succeeded by one of Instacart’s “highly talented senior executives.”

Onto today’s column…

As robots take on jobs that are dirty, dangerous and dull, startups view robots for agricultural work as ripe for picking—literally—despite recent failures in the sector. 

Last month, for instance, nine-year-old robotic weed-killing startup, FarmWise, was acquired by a salad producer after announcing plans to wind down. The same week, eight-year-old Advanced Farms, which built apple-picking robots, was acquired by an agricultural equipment company, citing a difficult investment climate for agricultural technology. And in March, Plenty, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars to develop robotic arms to grow crops on indoor walls, filed for bankruptcy.