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The tech industry is roiling from sweeping layoffs affecting tens of thousands of workers.
Executives are citing AI as the reason for the deep cuts, in contentious claims undermined by persistent shortcomings of the tech that continue to rear their ugly head.
Instead of mass firing staffers, OpenAI — the company that kickstarted today’s corporate AI fever with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 — is looking to almost double its headcount as soon as the end of this year, the Financial Times reports, as it comes under immense pressure.
The company is looking to grow to around 8,000 staffers, up from around 4,500 today, inside sources told the newspaper. The new jobs will operate across a variety of departments, from product development to sales. The company is also doubling down on support for its enterprise clients by building out a “technical ambassadorship” team.
The news comes after OpenAI’s CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, warned staffers at an all-hands that the company is going through a major reorganization, explaining that it’s “actively looking at which areas to deprioritize.”
“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” she told staff, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
According to the WSJ, the company is looking to double down on coding and enterprise users, suggesting the company is trying to find new ways to keep up with rival Anthropic, which has made major headway with Claude Code by focusing its efforts on paying enterprise users rather than its hundreds of millions of free-tier ChatGPT ones.
The unexpected success of coding models like Anthropic’s meant that “all of a sudden, [OpenAI] kind of rotated on its axis,” a source with knowledge of the matter told the FT.
The pressure from Anthropic remains unmistakable. According to data compiled by payments startup Ramp, business customers are three times as likely to choose Anthropic over OpenAI, a major reversal over just a year ago.
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