That makes complete sense to me. OpenAI is selling shovels and putting $$$ into improving and selling those shovels.

Salesforce (and other app builders) are buying those shovels (AI) to lower costs to build applications

Keeping this analogy, I guess it would be like not using shovels to build a shovel factory. Obviously, OpenAI needs a group of very talented experts, which are not getting replaced by AI soon, but they hire for all kinds of positions, including regular software engineers.

	▲	kadushka 9 months ago \| parent [-]
		Even if OpenAI hires 1000 people this year at $1M salary each, that’s just $1B. This year they plan to spend $8.7B. People they hire are still competitive with their best models, so why not hire people? Though I’ll be surprised if they’re still hiring two years from now.