“Learn to code,” they said.
Step by step
A new report from Semafor alleges that Silicon Valley darling and creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, has taken major steps to hire an “army” of outside contractors to better train a model to code – a move that could ultimately wipe out coding jobs entry-level.
The company, by Semafor, has recruited around 1,000 of these contractors – most of whom live “in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe”, according to people familiar with the matter – over the past six months. About 60% of those hired would have been required to do data labeling work, while the remaining 40% are computer programmers tasked with creating software engineering datasets on which to train OpenAI’s models.
“A well-established company,” reads a Spanish-translated OpenAI job posting posted by an outsourced recruiter, according to Semafor“who is committed to delivering world-class artificial intelligence technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer.”
During the interview process, prospects would be asked to take five-hour unpaid coding exams that involve identifying basic coding issues and providing solutions, explaining their thinking step-by-step in written English. One of OpenAI’s products, Codex, is an AI-powered text-to-code generator designed to translate the written word into working computer programs.
“They most likely want to feed this model with a very specific type of training data,” said an unnamed South American programming contestant. Semafor“where the human provides a step-by-step presentation of their thought process.”
Join the club
The codex was mostly trained on code fetched from GitHub, a practice that has given the model some success as a helper, code completion, and spell checker with some proficiency. GitHub – notably owned by Microsoft, the financial overlord of OpenAI – even offers a Codex-powered “co-pilot” which is essentially like Grammarly for programmers.
However, the work of these recently hired contractors would certainly take this type of AI to the next level.
Know what a line of code is might look like is one thing. Having a nuanced understanding of why and how a program should be written is another, and by quietly outsourcing the thought processes of human engineers, OpenAI seems determined to close that gap.
And while these machines probably won’t be writing high-level programs anytime soon, it seems fair to say that programmers looking for lower-level coding work should be wary of job prospects in the near future. coming. Sorry y’all – we hate to see anyone else join this party.
READ MORE: OpenAI hired an army of contractors to make basic coding obsolete [Semafor]
Learn more about OpenAI contractors: OpenAI apparently paid people in the developing world $2/hour to watch the most disturbing content imaginable