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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
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Friday February 10 2023, @11:20AM
Its really hard to get an MBA to understand technical work as long as his paycheck is not involved.
I have seen MBA wreck more companies by gutting their seasoned workforce, replacing them with much cheaper generic worker bees who have neither the experience or knowledge of those who created the company's product the customer used to get.
Its not long until the customer wises up and realizes the company he used to get good stuff from now produces ill-designed goods. All the customer gets is lots of contracts and forms, full of legal mumbo jumbo, presented by impeccably dressed people in impressive meeting rooms. But the product is nowhere as well-coiffed as the presentation.
In a couple of years, the management team will be on Linked-In anxiously awaiting the next gullible investment group. The engineering team is broken up beyond repair, and the world will have to wait until another technical group self-assembles and grows into a productive entity.
The investment groups will find the cash flow, bring in their MBA teams, and the whole scenario will play out again.
I've watched this happen several times now. Its almost like seeing an animal drinking antifreeze. The MBAs go in, then it's just a matter of time before the guts shut down and the organization ceases to produce a viable product anymore. The well dressed shakers of the hand will now depart with all the proceeds of the sale of all company assets.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]