Emily Forlini here, filling in for Allie. Sometimes, I wonder what would happen if the AI industry pointed its billions and top-tier talent into solving problems that matter most.
I’m talking about disease, hunger, and poverty. The industry often seems to obsess over white-collar productivity, with tools like ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Gemini promising to basically automate everything we don’t want to do.
But I think I finally found an AI executive who may actually have her head in the right place.
Fidji Simo, a French-born businesswoman and former CEO of Instacart, left her post as one of OpenAI’s top executives in early July. Now, she’s working to cure chronic diseases, including her own. Simo suffers from Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), which causes fatigue, fainting, nausea, headaches, and more. It’s considered incurable today, even though it affects millions of people, including the wife of OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman.
In my interview with Simo, she explained how her new startup, ChronicleBio, aims to use AI to analyze blood. The results will help segment POTS patients into more granular cohorts based on the source of their symptoms, rather than lumping them all together as Simo says the medical industry often does today. This can make clinical drug trials more targeted and successful, rather than inconclusive.
“The complexity of these diseases made it that without AI they were incredibly difficult to solve,” she told me. “They’re multisystem, so you need to be looking at the state of the nervous system, the state of the immune system, and how it correlates with your genetics. All of that is a massive data problem that was very hard to get your hands around without AI.”
After years of reporting on the tech industry, it’s refreshing to see a person in power trying to solve something so universal and personal. I know so many people with chronic conditions that doctors simply cannot solve, or even diagnose. There is still a massive profit incentive for bringing new, successful drugs to market—the fact that she suffers from the disease herself may mean she’ll at least approach it in an equitable way.
Now, let’s see what she can do.
Read my whole story here.
See you tomorrow,
Emily Forlini
X: @EmilyForliniEmail: emily.forlini@fortune.com
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