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OpenAI, the company at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI), has indicated that it will continue to hire employees to advance AI.
As of January 6, 2025, OpenAI is seeking to add 158 more employees to its team, as per its careers portal. The company is specifically seeking over 90 new employees for its research and engineering teams.
Nothing is surprising about a company requiring more hands. So, what’s the deal here? It circles back to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his recent blog post, in which he indicated that the company has achieved more or less artificial general intelligence (AGI).
“As we get closer to AGI, it feels like an important time to look at the progress of our company,” he said.
“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.”
Notably, OpenAI’s hiring plans provide an early insight into what the company is up to.
Superhumans for ‘Superintelligence’
Going by a corpus of technical roles, OpenAI will build general-purpose agents, which was already speculated earlier.
At the recent 12 Days of OpenAI event, the company announced everything except an agentic tool. Their agent, the ‘Project Operator,’ was set to be released in January, but no announcement has been made yet.
As per reports, the company is cautious about the malicious use of AI agents, which involves prompt injections that let bad actors feed harmful instructions to these systems. AIM’s earlier coverage explored such concerns with existing agents like Anthropic’s Computer Use, and OpenAI must avoid it at all costs. Having said that, the company is also hiring a wide range of safety experts and expanding its Anti Fraud and Abuse team.
Besides, the company is also hinting at more research on AI scaling laws, which have been subjected to widespread debate lately. Their Scaling Laws Group will continue their research on predictive scaling laws, newer experimental methodology, and evaluations.
Moreover, OpenAI is finally set to vertically integrate compute cluster design and operations. The company is hiring infrastructure engineers to design, build, and operate large-scale compute clusters to power advanced AI research as well as mechanical engineers to optimise hardware for AI workloads.
The company is also hiring research scientists to explore the intersection of healthcare and AI. OpenAI aims to create “trustworthy AI models that can assist medical professionals and improve patient outcomes”.
In short, OpenAI is looking for more humans to build superintelligence.
AIM reached out to OpenAI to further understand the company’s outlook for 2025 but did not elicit a response.
“We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that [AGI] to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else,” Altman said in the blog post.
However, this raises an important question: Has OpenAI achieved AGI internally if it still needs more and more human intelligence?
Isn’t OpenAI Using o3 Internally?
Pointing out that 150 of OpenAI’s recent job openings are engineering, a user on X stressed the unlikelihood of the company having achieved AGI.
OpenAI, however, needs more than what AGI is capable of. “AGI = avg/median human, or somehow above that. And OpenAI hires the top 0.1%, which are superhuman in many ways, “ said another user on X.
In December last year, the company announced the o3 family of AI models. Notably, the model surpassed human performance on several benchmarks.
For instance, in FrontierMath, a benchmark that contains the toughest mathematical questions, o3 solved 25% of them, surpassing the previous AI record of just 2%.
In another benchmark called ‘ARC-AGI’, the o3 model with high-compute settings reached 87.5%, surpassing the 85% human-level performance threshold. The model ranks 2,727 on Codeforces, equal to the 175th best human coder worldwide.
However, benchmarks aren’t everything. François Chollet, creator of the ARC-AGI benchmark, said that while it is the only AI benchmark that measures progress towards general intelligence, he doesn’t believe this is AGI. “There are still easy ARC-AGI-1 tasks that o3 can’t solve.”
Therefore, if OpenAI is hiring across various divisions despite claiming to have built the most powerful AI, it also provides an insight into what roles would thrive in an AI-dominant future and shows how not everything can be automated.
“Automation (including AI-based ones) always targets only the well-understood part of any job,” said Dariusz Debowczyk, an AI developer. He indicated that modern jobs consist of two components, a well-defined portion that follows well-defined procedures and a more nuanced aspect requiring human judgement and contextual understanding.
He defined the latter as the “fuzzy part” and said that it “requires human agency, specific context understanding, being able to ‘act in the world’ with no or limited tool support and dealing with unknowns”.
Marketing is the Hard Part
Apart from hiring “superhuman” engineers to build the next wave of intelligence, OpenAI is also hiring multiple people for non-engineering positions to help their customers use AI more.
The company is hiring over 30 positions for their ‘go-to-market’ team, which involves roles for sales, customer support, customer engagement and success, and solution architects that will help both enterprises and startups adopt and integrate AI applications and strategies.
In December last year, Salesforce took a similar approach. The company laid off 1,000 employees in the calendar year and cited AI as a way to reduce human workloads. However, CEO Marc Benioff revealed that they’re planning to hire 2,000 employees to sell Salesforce AI products and that they have also received 9,000 referrals for them.
“It may sound crazy, but the hardest job at an AI company is not engineering…it’s marketing,” venture capitalist Brianne Kimmel wrote on X.
“Incredibly hard to clearly communicate what you’ve built in a way that’s not overwhelming or immediately dismissed by someone who is just trying to do their job,” she added.
In addition, the company is hiring for several roles in finance, legal, design and business operations. All things considered, even at the company that can use the most powerful AI, it doesn’t seem like it is a replacement for the human workforce yet.
This leaves us with an important takeaway we often seem to forget. “The CEO of an AI company is incentivised to appear on the verge of a massive breakthrough in AI technology. AGI/ASI is a monumental task that, while possibly coming soon, will take a large amount of manpower to achieve,” an X user wrote in a post.
