Investment bankers might be next in line to be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence if OpenAI's latest push into the financial space is any indication. 

The House of Altman on Wednesday opened up a new position for an investment banking expert, whose responsibilities include making ChatGPT and its AI relations better at handling the complexities of major financial transactions like mergers, acquisitions, fundraising, and other high-value, high-stakes financial ventures.

The job notice mentions that investment banking is one of the most demanding knowledge work tasks around due to all the things bankers have to consider, and it seems to be hoping AI can serve as an assistant for some of Wall Street’s heaviest hitters. 

“We are looking for a Subject Matter Expert in Investment Banking to help define what excellent AI-assisted banking work looks like and turn that standard into better models and products,” OpenAI said in the posting. “You will use that expertise to design realistic tasks and evaluations, create and assess high-quality reference work, diagnose model failures, and help our technical teams improve model behavior and product experiences.”

OpenAI further describes the position as defining “the quality bar for AI-assisted investment banking,” making it seem suspiciously like the ChatGPT maker isn’t satisfied to keep its financial insights confined to the personal bank accounts of its individual users. 

The company announced in May that it was adding connectors for personal financial accounts to be integrated into ChatGPT, giving AI direct access to bank records and other financial data. The feature was rolled out generally to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users at the end of June. 

Now, it seems, OpenAI wants ChatGPT to help i-bankers, with the aforementioned “quality bar” touching things like research, analysis, valuation, modeling, diligence, transaction execution, and handling client materials. OpenAI apparently also wants its subject matter expert to help translate banking workflows into “representative evaluation tasks” that would allow AI to handle turning investment ideas into success, and generally “improve model performance on financial work.” 

Improvement would probably be warranted, given AI’s tendency to still get things wrong on the regular. OpenAI even admitted last year that its models are programmed to make things up rather than admitting they don’t know something. That's not exactly a comforting thought to businesses considering trusting an AI to provide advice on multi-billion-dollar deals.

OpenAI may have the hubris to believe an LLM that's frequently wrong and makes up facts can substitute for the subject matter expertise of an army of investment bankers, or it could just be unhappy with the investment banking world. The company, now in the process of going public, has slipped from being the darling of the AI world to playing second fiddle to Anthropic, which actually beat the ChatGPT lab to filing its own IPO documents. 

Some in the financial industry, meanwhile, are expressing concerns that the AI bubble OpenAI helped to inflate could pop, potentially taking the global economy with it. It's no wonder, then, that the company is looking to train its own investment banking AI that can present more favorable opinions of the AI space than skittish financial heavyweights.

In exchange for teaching an AI to do their own job, OpenAI’s future investment banking expert will be offered as much as $205K a year, plus equity. OpenAI didn’t respond to questions for this story. ®