OpenAI'” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to master finance as automation reshapes Wall Street jobs. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images</span>’>
Revising pitchbooks, formatting slides and tweaking font sizes—these are some of the tedious tasks that have long fallen to entry-level investment bankers eager to climb the ladder at Wall Street’s top firms. Now, former staffers across major banks are helping OpenAI train its A.I. to master such grunt work in a bid to expand the ChatGPT-maker’s reach in the financial sector, according to Bloomberg.
OpenAI has reportedly hired more than 100 contractors who previously worked at firms like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to take part in a secretive effort known internally as Project Mercury. Participants are expected to submit one financial model per week and are paid around $150 per hour, according to Bloomberg, citing documents and sources familiar with the matter.
The revelation is likely to heighten anxiety among Wall Street’s junior bankers, as A.I. continues to take on work that was once the domain of entry-level employees. Earlier this year, Stanford researchers found that workers aged 22 to 25 experienced a 13 percent decline in employment across job sectors exposed to A.I. since late 2022.
Like many other industries, Wall Street is rapidly embracing A.I., deploying it internally at firms from Morgan Stanley to Citigroup to Bank of America. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, is piloting an A.I. software engineer nicknamed Devin, alongside other initiatives, including the expansion of its GS AI Assistant platform. JPMorgan, for its part, is investing $2 billion annually in A.I.
Earlier this month, JPMorgan confirmed that its embrace of A.I. will lead to a slowdown in hiring. Due to A.I.’s “productivity tailwinds,” the bank will “constrain people’s headcount growth,” Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, told analysts during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.
Goldman Sachs has expressed similar intentions. In a recent memo to staff, CEO David Solomon and other executives said the bank plans to “constrain headcount growth through the end of the year” and carry out a “limited reduction in roles” as it focuses on opportunities created by A.I.
To apply for Project Mercury, prospective hires must first complete a 20-minute interview with an AI chatbot, according to Bloomberg. They are then tested on their financial statement knowledge before finishing the process with a modeling test.
OpenAI regularly works with various experts “to improve and evaluate the capability of our models across different domains,” the company said in a statement to the outlet, noting that such experts are “recruited, managed and compensated by third-party suppliers.”
OpenAI isn’t the only A.I. developer aiming to boost its financial expertise. In July, Anthropic rolled out a suite of Claude tools tailored for financial services firms. Cohere, a Canadian A.I. rival specializing in enterprise applications, counts the Royal Bank of Canada among its clients. Elon Musk’s xAI, too, is working to deepen its models’ financial knowledge. Earlier this year, the startup said it would focus on hiring specialized domain experts to train its LLMs in fields like finance.
