United Kingdom, Oct. 21 -- OpenAI is said to have quietly enlisted more than 100 former investment bankers to train its artificial intelligence models to replicate and eventually automate some of the most time-consuming tasks in finance, including building financial models and preparing pitch decks.

According to documents seen by Bloomberg, the effort - codenamed Project Mercury - involves ex-employees from major Wall Street firms such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, KKR, and Evercore.

The recruits are reportedly paid $150 per hour to create and refine AI training data that mimics the work of junior analysts and associates, from IPO modelling to restructuring transactions.

Participants are supposedly required to build...