First it peddled the poison, and now it’s selling the cure.
OpenAI announced that it’s launching a new AI-powered jobs platform next year that will use AI to match employers with potential candidates. Called the OpenAI Jobs Platform, the initiative will put it in direct competition with job juggernauts like LinkedIn, which has also been experimenting with integrating the tech.
It marks a new direction for the company, perhaps as it tries to maintain some semblance of its altruistic image. As its CEO Sam Altman has frequently warned for years now, it’s an inevitability, in his view, that the AI his company is creating will destroy jobs. Many bosses have openly boasted about replacing their workforce with AI agents.
Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, acknowledged the tech’s role in destroying jobs.
“We believe fundamentally that AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any technology in history, but it will also be disruptive,” Simo, who formerly led Instacart, told Bloomberg. “While we can’t eliminate the disruption, we can certainly help more people become fluent in AI and connect them with companies that need their skills.”
The platform’s main selling point is using AI to match candidates, though it hasn’t shared specifics on how this might work.
In tandem with the site’s launch, OpenAI is also working with companies like Walmart to create a certification program for teaching workers how to use AI on the job, with the goal of certifying 10 million Americans by 2030.
“I don’t envision it as just a simple job posting,” Simo explained to Bloomberg. “I envision it much more as candidates being able to talk about what they can offer and demonstrate that with a certification, and then us being able to match them with companies that have similar needs using AI.”
OpenAI Certifications, as the program’s been creatively dubbed, is framed as an expansion of the company’s Academy, an online learning hub with resources for learning about AI, that it launched earlier this year — but with a jobs focus.
The new Certifications program will teach workers the basics of the tech “all the way up to AI-custom jobs and prompt engineering,” Simo wrote in an official blog post. “AI-savvy” employees, she claims, are “more valuable, more productive, and are paid more than workers without AI skills.”
“We’ll obviously use AI to teach AI,” Simo added, explaining that all the instruction can be received inside the ChatGPT app.
Multiple studies have found that AI is already wreaking havoc on the job market and ruining career prospects. It’s also making the already soul-crushing process of finding work into a Sisyphean slog, as AI-generated profiles and résumés pollute job postings that are often themselves the work of something like ChatGPT.
It’s important to note, however, that when industry figureheads like Altman warn that AI is going to replace your job, it’s ultimately just a darker way of hyping up the tech. It’s pretty clear that in many cases that AI is nowhere near good enough to automate the tasks done by humans, though that hasn’t stopped employers from using it anyway with the tradeoff of shoddier work. Those same employers often find themselves scrambling to rehire humans once they come face to face with AI’s shortcomings.
Ever so benevolently, this is why OpenAI is swooping into save the day with the LinkedIn to end all LinkedIns.
“It’s all about being intentional about the kind of future we want to build,” Simo wrote in the blog post. “If we want to put more power into the hands of more people, not just a fortunate few, we need to help everyone, at every level, take advantage of the opportunities that come with AI.”
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