(Bloomberg) – OpenAI has over 100 Ex-Investment developers helping to train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work that Junior Bankers do in the industry.
The group, which includes employees from JPMorgan Chase & Co, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is part of a secret project within a startup called Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.
Most read from Bloomberg
Participants are paid $150 an hour to document potential and create financial models for a variety of acquisition types, including repurposing initial public offerings, according to a person familiar with the effort. The company has also given contractors early access to AI as it aims to enter jobs in investment banking.
The project underscores the urgency for Sam Altman’s Opena to make its powerful AI technology more useful to businesses across a wide range of industries, from financial consulting to technology. Despite reaching an estimated $500 billion earlier this month, the world’s top startup has yet to turn a profit.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company works with a range of experts “to develop and test the power of our models across different domains. Experts are recruited, managed and compensated by third-party providers.”
Investment Banking analysts often spend more than 80 hours a week working on live deals, building detailed models for Microsoft Corp. Often they face a strong stream of requests from light-ups to make tweaks to make their own PowerPoint slide decks, and then tweaks to those tweaks – the culture is motivated by the street wall “pls.
Already, BEVY of Startups is looking to go inside and equip banks with AI that can help with all that. While commentators have long complained of Drudgery, the rise of AI is now attracting concerns about its safety in the workplace.
The application process for Project Mercury involves almost no human interaction, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing non-public information.
The first step is about 20 conversations with an AI Chatbot, which asks questions based on the progress of the request. The second stage tests candidates on their knowledge of financial statements. The last stage is the modeling test.
