OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made another attempt to recruit new people to the company via social media. In his latest post on X, Altman urged high-frequency trading (HFT) professionals to join OpenAI and use their skills to help build artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Just a day earlier, Altman had made another “desperate” attempt at recruiting, looking for someone with a background in compiler design or programming language design.
“if you are interested in infrastructure and very large-scale computing systems, the scale of what’s happening at openai right now is insane and we have very hard/interesting challenges. please consider joining us! we could desperately use your help.” Altman wrote in his post on X.
This isn’t the first time Altman has spoken about the new challenges posed by OpenAI’s reach. Since ChatGPT‘s new viral moment with Ghibli-style images, Altman has talked about how his team was losing sleep to keep things working well, while also citing a shortage of GPUs.
In a recent TED talk, Chris Anderson inadvertently let slip that OpenAI had recently doubled its user base, while Altman gave an official figure of 5,00,000 weekly active users. At its peak, ChatGPT was used to generate over 700 million images, Altman had previously confirmed.
AI race heats up:
ChatGPT has been at the forefront of AI development for a long time, having gained the first-mover advantage with the launch of its foundation model in late 2022. While the company faced competition from many new and old players such as Google, Anthropic and xAI, the real threat to its existence came in January this year when Chinese AI DeepSeek gained popularity in the West, dethroning ChatGPT as the most popular app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Since then, OpenAI has launched many new offerings, including GPT-4.5 foundation model, o3 Mini reasoning model, Deep Research and Operator AI agents, native image generation for GPT-4o, and most recently GPT 4.1 model for developers. All these new features have helped OpenAI to regain its position as one of the top companies in the AI arena.