Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
 

The stated goal is to reduce drudgery. Do you believe that?

Bloomberg reports OpenAI Looks to Replace the Drudgery of Junior Bankers’ Workload.

My title is a more accurate representation of the true goal.

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 & Co., Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is part of a secretive project inside the startup that’s code named Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg.

Participants are paid $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 it’s creating that aims to replace entry-level tasks at investment banks.

The project underscores the urgency at Sam Altman’s OpenAI to make its powerful AI technology more useful to businesses across a wide swath of industries, from consulting to finance to legal to technology. Despite reaching a $500 billion valuation earlier this month, the world’s largest startup has yet to turn a profit.

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 modeling test.

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 italicizing percentages.

We all know what the goal is.

What we don’t know is how successful AI will be in that goal.

We also don’t know how this model that hasn’t made a dime supports a $500 billion valuation.

Is AI a Magic Bullet or a a Doomsday Machine?
 

On October 14, I asked Is AI a Magic Bullet or a a Doomsday Machine?

I don’t believe it’s either but I do suggest these valuations are more than a bit stretched.

For discussion, please see Circular Investment Deals in AI Look Similar to the Dot-Com Bubble

By the way, why can AI just look at some reports and do all of this itself.

More By This Author: