Semafor: “OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT, has ramped up its hiring around the world, bringing on roughly 1,000 remote contractors over the past six months in regions like Latin America and Eastern Europe, according to people familiar with the matter. About 60% of the contractors were hired to do what’s called “data labeling” — creating massive sets of images, audio clips, and other information that can then be used to train artificial intelligence tools or autonomous vehicles. The other 40% are computer programmers who are creating data for OpenAI’s models to learn software engineering tasks. OpenAI’s existing Codex product, launched in Aug. 2021, is designed to translate natural language into code. “A well-established company, which is determined to provide world-class AI technology to make the world a better and more efficient place, is looking for a Python Developer,” reads one OpenAI job listing in Spanish, which was posted by an outsourcing agency. Previously, OpenAI trained its models on code scraped from GitHub, a repository site owned by its largest investor, Microsoft, which last week confirmed multi billion dollars in new funding first reported by Semafor. But in this case, OpenAI appears to be building a dataset that includes not just lines of code, but also the human explanations behind them written in natural language…”

See also PC Mag – Watch Out, Software Engineers: ChatGPT Is Now Finding, Fixing Bugs in Code – “A new study asks ChatGPT to find bugs in sample code and suggest a fix. It works better than existing programs, fixing 31 out of 40 bugs.”