From Semafor, August 7:
The ScoopIn early 2022, Jonathan Siddharth, CEO of staffing firm Turing, drove up from Palo Alto for a meeting at OpenAI’s San Francisco office.
Siddharth thought he was there to pitch OpenAI on Turing’s specialty: finding high-quality software engineers to work as contractors. Instead, he found himself in a room full of AI researchers who wanted something entirely different: data.
OpenAI had found that adding bits of computer code into the datasets used to train its large language model, then GPT-3, helped increase the model’s reasoning ability.
That’s why its AI researchers wanted as much computer code as they could get, and they wanted it to be good. They asked Siddharth if he could raise an army of computer coders who would complete specific software engineering tasks so their work could be ingested into OpenAI’s next project: GPT-4.
“What I remember distinctly is the scale of their ambition in terms of how big they were thinking,” Siddharth told Semafor in an interview. “Their demand from us was like a crazy high spike in terms of how much data they wanted in how little time.”
Turing’s work played an important role in helping OpenAI make a massive leap in performance that blew away the competition and shocked the world when it was released in November 2022 in the form of ChatGPT, according to a former OpenAI employee with knowledge of the matter.
It also changed Turing’s business model. In the nearly three years since it began working with OpenAI, Turing has launched a suite of AI consulting services, and counts as clients nearly every major foundation model provider, as well as large companies that want to train their own AI models. The $1 billion startup has also moved beyond coding and is providing specialized data from a wide array of industries.
“It’s very impressive, the transition they pulled off,” said Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who is an investor in Turing and a board member at OpenAI (he wasn’t involved or aware of the first pitch meeting with Turing). “It’s almost like the first business just got them these capabilities internally around managing large numbers of contractors and engineers. And then that was just the perfect way to build that up to then be able to address this new market, which I think is ultimately going to be much bigger.”....
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