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fliptop writes:

OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter:

About 60% of the contractors were hired to do what's called "data labeling" — creating massive sets of images, audio clips, and other information that can then be used to train artificial intelligence tools or autonomous vehicles.

The other 40% are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI's models to learn software engineering tasks. OpenAI's existing Codex product, launched in Aug. 2021, is designed to translate natural language into code.

[...] Previously, OpenAI trained its models on code scraped from GitHub, a repository site owned by its largest investor, Microsoft, which last week confirmed multi billion dollars in new funding first reported by Semafor. But in this case, OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code, but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language.

[...] Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, recently put the company's headcount at 375 people, a tiny number compared to the thousands of staff at tech giants like Google and Facebook working on artificial intelligence. "I know I'm not supposed to brag about OpenAI," he tweeted, touting the company's "talent density."

Originally spotted on The Eponymous Pickle.

Previously: Why OpenAI's Codex Won't Replace Coders

Related: OpenAI and Microsoft Announce Extended, Multi-Billion-Dollar Partnership

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