OpenAI reportedly hiring 1K outsourced contractors
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — AI company and ChatGPT creator OpenAI is reportedly hiring around 1,000 outsourced contractors from Latin America and Eastern Europe.
According to a report by the news website Semafor, 60% of these contractors were hired to do data labeling jobs which include creating massive sets of images, audio clips, and other information that can then be used to train artificial intelligence (AI) tools or autonomous vehicles.
The other 40%, meanwhile, are creating data for OpenAI’s models to learn software engineering tasks in line with the firm’s existing Codex product which is designed to translate natural language into code.
Aside from hiring coders and programmers, a report from TIME also revealed that OpenAI hired a firm in Kenya to work on content moderation in its ChatGPT platform.
This news comes as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked about the company’s 375 headcount and “talent density” as it comes out as a tiny number compared to tech giants like Google and Facebook.
Although Altman seemed not to include their contractors in that figure, OpenAI repeatedly noted the importance of outsourced labor in building its technology.
In a paper released last year, the firm’s researcher wrote, “Finally, we’d like to thank all of our contractors for providing the data that was essential for training the models.”
