OpenAI to dramatically slow hiring under financial crunch

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So maybe it’s not surprising that the company is opting to pump the brakes. During a livestreamed town hall event on Monday, Altman said that OpenAI is looking to “dramatically slow down” hiring as the company continues to lose billions of dollars each quarter, as Business Insider reports.

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Altman’s admission also suggests that several years of aggressive hiring in the AI sector could be screeching to a halt as the industry continues to face pressure from investors getting antsy about the waning prospects of a return. The news is particularly notable after years of AI companies embracing an unprecedented hiring spree, desperately trying to poach talent from their competitors by offering them astronomical pay packages.

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At the same time, selling those future prospects to investors could become more difficult as well. OpenAI, for instance, is already struggling with stalling subscriber growth — and that’s before pestering its users with ads or paywalling existing features behind expensive monthly subscriptions. (The company is currently mulling over how much to charge for ads.)

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As former Fidelity manager George Noble fulminated in a scorching thread on X, the AI industry may have already hit a point of diminishing returns. Companies still have a lot to prove — for instance, chatbots still suffer from rampant hallucinations — as the goalposts continue to be moved. “The low-hanging fruit is gone,” he wrote. “Every incremental improvement now requires exponentially more compute, more data centers, more power.”

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