Sam Altman says non-technical people can work on making AGI happen if they have taste

• Sam Altman says OpenAI is looking for people with good taste to work on AGI.
• And that includes people with non-tech backgrounds, Altman said.
• He said the best research teams are built on "taste and a real feel for where the field is headed next."

Want to make big bucks in AI without a technical background? There still might be room for you.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a Thursday post on X that "people who are not technical" can work on developing artificial general intelligence — in research recruiting.

"We believe the best research teams are built through context, taste and a real feel for where the field is headed next; research recruiting is about finding people who will move the frontier forward, not just filling roles," Altman wrote.

He added that Tifa Chen, OpenAI's head of research recruiting, is "looking for exceptional recruiters from non-traditional backgrounds, former founders especially."

"Taste" generally refers to having proper, decisive, and well-supported takes on the direction in which projects should go. It's wading through AI slop and drivel to surface gems.

If you have good decision-making skills, or if you have the chops to call yourself a connoisseur of something, that could be proof of good taste.

The great taste debate has long been brewing in the AI sphere. It resurfaced after Y Combinator founder Paul Graham posted on X on February 14 about taste in AI.

"When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make," Graham wrote.

OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, wrote on X several days later that "taste is a new core skill."

After these takes from AI's top dogs, memes on "taste" went viral on social media, as Business Insider's Henry Chandonnet reported — mostly because whether one has "good taste" or not is highly subjective.

To be sure, tech's takes on taste go even further back. Apple's Steve Jobs, for one, said in a 1995 CBS interview that making great products "ultimately, it comes down to taste."

"Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas," Jobs said. "And I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."