OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers helping train its artificial intelligence on how to build financial models as it looks to replace the hours of grunt work performed by junior bankers across the industry. The group, which includes former employees of JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., are part of secretive project inside the startup that’s code named Mercury, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Participants are paid $150 per hour to write prompts and build financial models for a range of transaction types, including restructurings and initial public offerings, according to a person familiar with the effort. The company has also granted the contractors early access to the AI its creating that aims to replace entry-level tasks at investment banks. The project underscores the urgency at Sam Altman’s OpenAI to make its powerful AI technology more useful to businesses across a wide swath of industries, from consulting to finance to legal to technology.

Full exclusive : OpenAI has more than 100 ex-investment bankers paid $150 per hour to train its AI to build financial models as part of its secretive Project Mercury.