OpenAI Secretly Pays Ex-Bankers to Train AI for Financial Modeling
Pasting interesting details from the article first reported by Bloomberg:
"[NEW YORK] OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work performed by junior bankers across the industry.
The group, which includes former employees of JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group, are part of secretive project inside the startup that’s code named Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.
Participants are paid US$150 per hour to write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings, according to a person familiar with the effort.
The company has also granted the contractors early access to the AI its creating that aims to replace entry-level tasks at investment banks.
...
The application process for Project Mercury involves almost no human interaction, according to the person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named discussing non-public information.
The first step is a roughly 20 minute interview with an AI chatbot, which asks questions based on the applicant’s resume. The second phase tests candidates on their knowledge of financial statements. The final stage is a modelling test.
The job is flexible and contractors are expected to submit one model per week, the person said. Instructions include writing prompts in simple terms, then executing the model.
Participants receive feedback from a reviewer and are expected to fix any issues before their work is ultimately plugged into OpenAI’s systems, the person said.
Project Mercury has so far drawn participants who’ve previously worked at a variety of Wall Street outposts, including Brookfield, Mubadala Investment, Evercore and KKR, the documents show.
Some current MBA candidates at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are also participating in the effort.
Participants are asked to create their models in Excel and they’re also expected to follow industry norms for formatting the models, including for areas like margin sizes and italicising percentages."
Yea this was a very interesting read. The sense I get from this article is that the current financial models being put out by OpenAI are complete garbage. Especially when it comes to bespoke modeling and specific product modeling as seen in product groups. Matt levine had some great commentary on this on his latest money stuff column if anyone is interested. If they are doing training by hand with ex bankers, I expect it’ll be a couple more years before it takes some of our jobs. Even then, my mindset always goes to “if ai takes 50% of banking jobs, I just need to be in the top 50%”
Current AI models are trash, and the bubble will burst before they make serious immediate headway on this. Not that this won’t be disruptive (read: helpful), but we’re a ways out.
They’re cutting out mercor who has been doing this for months already?
Mercor does staffing so mercor prolly doing it for them?
Yeah well Mercor supposedly already staffs for them - like when you’re reached out to Mercor the whole idea is you’re interviewing to work with OpenAI already and then hired by them as a contractor. This post confuses me because they’re either
1) just going public about that quiet partnership for marketing reasons or
2) OAI is actually skipping the Mercor staffing part entirely and cutting them out by hiring bankers full time on their side.
*If it’s #2, that’s pretty huge because that could have slashed Mercor’s valuation in half (at least) overnight.* They’re only valuable if all the major foundational labs use them for finding professionals to do evals. Tangentially related and not really mercor’s problem yet, but you could be very bearish and say companies like Uber getting into having drivers do “tasks” (which are a fancy word for finding people to label data/do evals) means other players are seeing the game and starting to enter this market. The foundational labs have run out of data - so they’re scrambling to get volunteers to improve their data or get access to private enterprise data to feed the models.
Basically the way this is framed I would think Mercor is involved but why not include them in the press as a strategic partner?
Omg - that’s so gross. Where?
How do I apply for this 😂
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