The technology sector is laying off en masse: OpenAI is doing the opposite, according to Semafor

The wave of layoffs in big technology is a global problem. Amazon, Google, HP, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, salesforce, Phillips. The list of companies affected by this trend is huge. However, there are some exceptions. Notable among them are the American Apple and Open AI.

While the apple company, which is one of the most valuable in the world, has weathered the crisis thanks to its restraint in hiring staff during the pandemic, among other factors, OpenAI is on the rise. The startup led by Sam Altman has hired about 1,000 people.

The creators of ChatGPT, against the current of the industry

Information comes from the hand of Semafor, the outlet that accurately teased Microsoft’s latest investment in OpenAI. The hiring, however, is not being made in the country of origin of the company focused on artificial intelligence, but regions such as Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Specifically, these are contractors who will carry out their work remotely, so they will not have to go to the OpenAI offices. Now, the selection requirements allow us to get an idea of ​​which direction the company that creates applications as successful as ChatGPT and DALL·E is heading.

More than half of the new staff hired, specifically 60%, will be in charge of “data labeling”. That is, to identify and classify the wide range of information that will be part of the datasets needed to train artificial intelligence models.

It should be noted that this is an elementary requirement to achieve datasets quality, which over time will become increasingly precious, according to some researchers. For example, if it contains images of dogs, they should be labeled as “dogs” and not as “cats”.

The other 40% of the team hired by OpenAI will be in charge of tasks related to programming. They will perform tasks aimed at improving the ability of AI models of learn software engineering tasks. Let’s remember that the GitHub Copilot programming assistant works with the company’s Codex model.

As we mentioned at the beginning, Microsoft invested “billions of dollars” in the startup. In the investment announcement, the Redmond company indicated that this injection of money would serve to improve Copilot, Microsoft Designer, among other things. OpenAI seems to have enough money in its coffers to keep hiring.

And, if we’re talking about money, now that practically everyone is talking about ChatGPT, its creators have decided to launch a paid version. For 20 dollars a month constant access to the tool, better response times and priority access to new features and improvements are guaranteed. Another source of revenue for OpenAI.

Images: Open AI | ChatGPT Screenshot

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