The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - OpenAI Launches Jobs and Certifications
Episode Date: September 5, 2025OpenAI just launched a jobs platform and AI certifications, sparking debate over whether it’s ambition, anxiety management, or a lack of focus. We dig into what’s really going on and why it matter...s. Plus: ChatGPT adds branching conversations, Lovable shifts its success metrics, Google debuts an on-device model, and Atlassian buys The Browser Company for $610M.Brought to you by:KPMG – Discover how AI is transforming possibility into reality. Tune into the new KPMG 'You Can with AI' podcast and unlock insights that will inform smarter decisions inside your enterprise. Listen now and start shaping your future with every episode. https://www.kpmg.us/AIpodcastsBlitzy.com - Go to https://blitzy.com/ to build enterprise software in days, not months Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results https://robotsandpencils.com/Vanta - Simplify compliance - https://vanta.com/nlwThe Agent Readiness Audit from Superintelligent - Go to https://besuper.ai/ to request your company's agent readiness score.The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614Interested in sponsoring the show? nlw@aidailybrief.ai
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Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI announces a new jobs and certification initiative.
And in the headlines, they have also launched a much requested feature, which is the ability to branch conversations.
That much more in today's AI Daily Brief.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes.
We kick off today with a feature that you can probably tell that I am very enthusiastic about.
On Thursday, OpenAI tweeted, by popular request, you can now branch conversations in chat GPT,
letting you more easily explore different directions without losing your original thread.
I cannot even begin to tell you how many conversations I have in chat GPT that are just
endless long strings where I will go back and circle up to some piece from eight responses
up before and desperately hope it all works while trying to keep all the context.
Now there is an actual UI solution to try to fork conversations into different areas
all keeping that original prompt in context.
And I think that that is going to make a massive difference, especially for the sort of
strategy and ideation work that I love using chat GPT for.
Now, this is very clearly a much demanded feature.
McKay Wrigley wrote, have wanted this since like OG ChatGPT release, so useful.
Testing catalog actually noticed the feature when it started showing up in testing last week,
writing this could help researchers, power users, or anyone running comparative prompts,
as it reduces friction when exploring multiple approaches or when retracing steps is needed
due to suboptimal outcomes in one branch.
Now, remember, as Sam Altman has started talking about GPT,
Six, he's been saying that it's all about memory and users having better control of context.
This is a tiny little but still very significant nod in that direction and one that I think
will be useful right away.
Next up, a really cool update in how at least one company is thinking about their goals in
the vibe or agentic coding space.
Obviously, the stratospheric growth of the vibe coding apps has been one of the big stories
of the year.
In fact, it's currently my pick for the most important AI phenomenon of 2025 and it's hard
for me to see how that's going to be displaced by anything in just the next couple of months,
although that, of course, could happen. And while the rapid pace of revenue growth is a clear
metric of success, revenue alone doesn't capture how useful these products are to people.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently shared that around 40% of the company's daily coding
is AI generated, and he's trying to get it to over 50% by next month. But what was really
interesting to me was when this week, Lovable CEO Antonosica focused in on a new way to measure how
his product is performing. He posted,
Lovable apps have officially been visited
100 million times in the last two months.
With that milestone, we're changing
lovable success metric to be proportional to the
traffic users' products get, because if our
users succeed, we succeed.
Now, this is something that you might remember came up
when we were looking at the top 100 Gen.I. Consumer
apps, that and Driesen Horowitz generated list.
When they were talking about vibe coding,
they were noting that there was some really meaningful
signal in the traffic going not just to
lovable.dev and replet.com, which is the places where users access the vibe coding tools,
but on the domains where you can host the things that you build with those tools, i.e. lovable.
app app and replet.com. Projects on the replet.com domain had gotten up to a couple million
monthly visits, while projects on the lovable.combe domain had gotten all the way up to 10 million
monthly visits. So now that seems to be what Antoine and Lovable are focused on when they think
about the success of these agenda coding platforms. I think this is a great shift.
one that will help us understand if and how we're moving past the novelty phase of agentic coding
and into a time when this is just increasingly a way that people build real things.
Moving over to new models, one thing that was a big topic of conversation in about the middle of last year,
but has been a little bit more muted this year, is all of the work that's going into shrinking models
to be able to run them on devices without touching the cloud.
Still that work is ongoing, and yesterday, Google CEO Sundarpa Chai tweeted,
introducing embedding Gemma, our newest open model that can run completely on device.
It's the top model under 500 million parameters on the MTEB benchmark, and comparable to models
nearly twice its size, enabling state-of-the-art embeddings for search retrieval and more.
Now, the model appeared good enough to elicit a response from Elon Musk, who commented simply
impressive. As an embedding model, this means it's used for AI search functions like RAG and
semantic search rather than text generation, but obviously what a company like Google is trying to do
is to enable these features to be built into devices like their mobile handsets or deployed locally
in sensitive areas where cloud-based models are less appropriate. These are the types of innovations
that aren't going to be big, splashy announcements on the stages of Google I.O. But could be some
of the most significant things when it comes into how your devices, your Android pixel phones,
your ultimate iPhones, etc., actually function and allow you to do new AI-enabled things.
One M&A story today, Enterprise Software Giant Atlassian is acquiring the browser company for
610 million. The browser company are the creators of Dia, which is an agentic AI browser that is
competing with, among others, perplexities comet. Atlassian, if you're unfamiliar, offers a suite of
work tools like ticketing management software, Jira, and Visual Task Management app Trello.
This is Atlassian's largest acquisition since they bought video instruction platform Loom in
$23 for almost a billion. Now, I should note that if you are watching the conversation around this
on Twitter slash X, there is a lot of weird sour grapes and people being angry about how much
the price was. I'm completely and utterly disinterested in that entire discourse, but if you want
to go find it, it's there. What's much more interesting to me is what this says about the state
of the AI browser wars. Frankly, it's interesting to see an enterprise software company
adding a browser to their suite. Until very recently, browsers have basically been an undifferentiated
massive Chrome Forks. You might choose based on a particular set of privacy priorities or other
features, but there wasn't all that much reason for an enterprise B2B company like Atlassian
to offer their own browser. That doesn't seem to be the key.
case anymore. It seems pretty clear that they believe that the quality of AI infrastructure is going
to be a key differentiating factor. And indeed, the central pitch of this is that Atlassian seems to want
to take Dia and turn it into a work-focused AI browser. There is going to be a shift in what the company
works on. Josh Miller, the browser company CEO said, we talked a lot about shopping, making reservations,
finding showtimes. That's going to go away in terms of our focus. Meanwhile, Alassian CEO Mike Cannon
Brooks wrote that while rival browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge,
Quote, do a very good job.
They're built for everyone and limits what they can do for specialists.
Our goal isn't 6 billion users.
It's the billion knowledge workers who need a better tool.
When it comes to the state of the conversation around this,
browser company's CEO Josh Miller is surprisingly candid.
He basically said in no uncertain terms that he thinks that the winner of the AI
browser space is going to be crowned in the next one to two years,
and that for them to be able to compete, they needed bigger distribution that they could get.
I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about the window of our
opportunity that we're in, and I agree entirely that this is the time for big moves.
The winners of the next generation of business are going to be built in the next 12 to 24 months,
and anything that anyone can do to skip the line and compete bigger is, on average, I think,
going to be better. So congrats to the team over at Dia slash the browser company,
excited to see what they do with it in this work context. For now that is going to do it for
today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode.
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Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief.
Today we are talking about a new initiative from OpenAI, where they are launching jobs and
certifications.
Now, what makes this interesting is that there are a variety of interpretations in ways
that people are looking at it out there.
Some are seeing it as OpenAI deciding that they want to go compete with LinkedIn.
Others think it's a response to growing anxiety around AI-related job loss.
Then there's the interpretation that people think that Open AI's valuation is to
high and they're just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. We're going to break it down,
talk about what they're doing, get into some of those takes, and ultimately try to figure out
what this says about where the company is headed. So first of all, let's talk about the news. It was
announced by new CEO for Applications, Fiji Simo. It was announced with a blog post called
expanding economic opportunity with AI. Fiji writes, whenever I talk with people about AI,
one of the first questions I get is what is it going to mean for my job or how will it impact
my company? I tell them, I believe AI will unlock
more opportunities for more people than any technology in history. It will help companies operate more
efficiently, give anyone the power to turn their ideas into income, and create jobs that don't even
exist today. But AI will also be disruptive. Jobs will look different. Companies will have to adapt,
and all of us, from shift workers to CEOs, will have to learn how to work in new ways. At OpenAI,
we can't eliminate that disruption. But what we can do is help more people become fluent in
AI and connect them with companies that need their skills to give more people economic opportunities.
So what does that look like in practice? Well, like I said, they are announced two initiatives.
The first is the OpenAI Jobs Platform. Simo writes, if you're a business looking to hire an AI
savvy employee, or you just need help with a specific task, finding the right person can be hit or
miss. The Open AI Jobs Platform will have knowledgeable, experienced candidates at every level,
and opportunities for anyone looking to put their skills to use. Seymal also says that this will
not just be prioritized for big companies. She writes, it will have a track dedicated to helping
local businesses compete, and local governments find the AI talent they need to better serve their
constituents. Naturally, however, with all these people applying for jobs saying that they are AI savvy,
how will companies be able to tell if they're actually AI fluent? Well, enter the second product
that was announced AI certifications. This is sort of the natural extension of the OpenAI Academy,
which is their online learning platform. Simo writes, we're going to expand the Academy by offering
certifications for different levels of AI fluency, from the basics of using AI at work,
all the way up to AI custom jobs and prompt engineering. We'll obviously use AI to teach AI.
Anyone will be able to prepare for the certification in chat GPT study mode and become certified
without leaving the app. And companies will be able to make it part of their own learning
and development programs. So that's the announcement. And like I said, there is a lot of
interpretation going on around this. The first line of discussion is this idea that open AI is
somehow now trying to compete with LinkedIn.
CNBC's article about this was called OpenAI is building an AI jobs platform that could
challenge Microsoft's LinkedIn.
And this article's whole thrust is all about how this is yet another sign of the fraying
relationship between these two.
This was also a common theme on Twitter.
Peter Wildaford writes, what does Microsoft think about this?
The Microsoft OpenAI relationship continues to fray.
I tend to think that this narrative is completely oversold and misses the mark here.
Basically, to the extent that OpenAI ends up competing with LinkedIn because of this initiative,
I think that will be incidental to whatever they were trying to accomplish.
First of all, as high-density as some jobs boards are, it is not winner-take-all in the same way
that a social network is.
If you just look at the landscapes of jobs, they're obviously much more fragmented.
Theoretically, if you could get everyone in the same spot, it would be really good for everyone,
but in practice, that's just not how it's played out.
Secondly, it is very normal at this point.
for companies that are introducing new types of software and new technology
to offer some amount of training on their own tools.
Salesforce has an entire academy that has its own certifications.
Oracle has versions of this.
It's just kind of part of what you do.
Now, it is the case that Sam Altman has talked about
how he's interested in building a social network,
and so maybe that's inflaming this narrative,
and the company did bring in an entire CEO of applications in Fiji Simo,
so I don't think it's totally off base,
but I mostly think that the people who are talking about this,
are trying to read it into a Shakespearean drama between Microsoft and OpenAI, because it makes for
interesting reading. Now, on the other hand, the idea that this is a response to growing job anxiety,
I think, is a little bit more legit. Obviously, since they launched, AI companies have been very
attuned to this particular concern. The farther away we've moved from people's primary considerations
being robot takeovers, the more that Jobs really continues to rear its head as the thing that
people are anxious about when it comes to AI. And what's more, it definitely
feels like that concern is on an upswing right now as we're starting to see studies that show
at least some evidence that there may be an impact in certain places. We talked a little bit about
this study from Stanford, where they argue that there are some indicators that young people
in jobs that are more exposed to AI are seeing lower employment rates than their peers. They
basically found that early career workers between ages 22 and 25 who were in what they considered
the most AI-exposed occupations, basically they organized all jobs into
five categories of how exposed to AI they were. They said those young people in the most
AI-exposed occupations have seen a 13% relative decline in employment. Now, they're very
careful to point out that it is not 100% that that is about AI. There are a lot of other
things going on. There's some amount of resetting after a big hiring post-COVID. And there are
certainly other potential explanations as well, but it's enough of a signal that people are
sitting up and paying attention. What's more, a second paper from Harvard PhD students found
similar results by analyzing LinkedIn resumes and job posting data. The paper was called
generative AI as seniority biased technological change, evidence from U.S. resume and job posting data,
and again, find some nascent but compelling evidence that early career folks are having a harder
time in this era of AI. Then on top of all of this, we also this week saw the release of a huge
report from the Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, breaking down how many net jobs are expected to be lost
sector by sector. It scored each industry on how fast they would be disrupted,
and came to the conclusion that a net of 45 million U.S. jobs are expected to be lost due to AI.
Now, this was ultimately a very long pitch for UBI, which is one of the big things that this fund focuses on,
so you have to take it with that grain of salt.
But our point for the purposes of understanding why OpenAI would do this now is that this narrative is on the rise.
Of course, though, AI won't just take jobs, it will create new jobs,
and that's sort of the point that Open AI is trying to make with their jobs board.
Recently, LinkedIn founder, Reid Hoffman, was discussing these studies and wrote,
If you're entering the workforce today, you have a unique advantage. You can grow up working
with co-pilots, understanding the leverage they give you as an employee, and help your companies
figure out how to integrate AI into their work. The real test will be whether we treat this
moment as a warning or an opening. I do think that to some extent, this is OpenAI trying to get
out ahead of that discussion. Now, connected to all of this is a political dimension. Open AI is
explicit that this is part of a response to the White House's efforts to expand AI literacy. In that
announcement post, Simo wrote, we're launching these new initiatives as part of our commitment to
the White House's efforts towards expanding AI literacy. They also put a number of goal around the
certification, saying that they're committed to certifying 10 million Americans by 2030.
Now, outside of whether this was competition for LinkedIn or just a straight response to AI
job anxiety, I saw really two different types of interpretations. The first was basically some version of,
wow, is this company ambitious? And they're coming for everything. And the other was, this feels like
kind of a lack of focus, and we're not sure how it all fits together.
Nilesh Trevetti, for example, wrote,
feels like a big anti-signal, to be honest.
I actually saw enough variations of these that I tweeted out a little poll,
asking whether people thought it was a sign of ambition
or a sign of being lost in the sauce,
and while the sample size is very small,
a little under 100 respondents,
it was fairly evenly split.
53.6% said it was ambitious,
46.4% said it was an indication of them being lost.
Abu from DataInsight.com writes,
to me it looks like they're trying everything to be profitable.
Right now, their main income is chat GPT and API,
but they're clearly moving down the application layer.
AI certifications that could print money.
The jobs platform, not so sure.
When you scale, chasing every vertical isn't always smart.
They're even toying with social media,
but honestly, that's unlikely to work.
I saw some version of this response a lot.
And what I would say about it is that I think it's a little bit more nuanced.
First of all, OpenAI's revenue is growing extremely fast.
Not as fast as Anthropics right now, thanks to the coding applications, but still extremely, extremely quickly.
I think that they have very barely scratched the surface on just how much consumer and business slash API revenue there is out there.
At the same time, OpenAI has always seemed to me to understand that they are going to have to own the relationships with their customers.
I do not think that they're content to just build the platform that powers things underneath.
I think that they believe that they are going to have to exist at the interface with the customer to have long-term durability.
and long-term moats. Fiji Simo coming in as the CEO of applications, I think, is an indicator of that.
And there were some people who absolutely groked that this could be a very successful business line.
Kevin Yang wrote, OpenAI certs is a great idea. This basically forces people to learn chat
GPT to get a job, the best lock-in. I would go further and say, learning chat GPT is already
sort of a requirement to get a job, and it's a reasonable thing to explore whether OpenAI wants
to be the ones who own the certifications, or at least the anchor certifications that says someone
is actually good at ChatGBT.
Wes Roth writes,
if the model works,
AI fluency could become the next
must-have line on every resume.
An open AI would sit at the center
of the talent marketplace it's creating.
Again, I think already AI fluency
is a must-have line on most resumes.
And again, the only question to me
is how much it makes sense
for the platforms themselves
versus third parties
to be in this certification game.
We moved away from it,
but this is something we talked about
doing a lot when Superintelligent
was in its earliest incarnations
as a learning platform.
I think there's the other piece of this
which is worth noting that OpenAI might just be legit when they say they really want people
to have more economic opportunity in the future. OpenAI's head of education, Leobelsky, posted
on LinkedIn, I've spent the last decade of my career building new pathways to jobs and careers
in partnerships with universities throughout the world. OpenAI has rapidly become a top learning
destination in a place where people are demonstrating their skills each and every day.
I'm excited to see a world where OpenAI can help credential those who have built cutting-edge
skills and connect them to the jobs of the future. And having known Leah at various parts of her
career, which, by the way, have always been at education companies. I know at least for her,
and of course this doesn't necessarily speak for the organization as a whole. Those motivations
are exactly as she says. Ultimately, this might just be one of those times where good press
meets good business. OpenAI announced this initiative with a bunch of partners, including Walmart,
and it strikes me that this is sort of a worst-case scenario. This is a good corporate citizen
initiative. And best-case scenario, it's a serious revenue line for the future. In any case, I think a
super interesting moment and a super interesting initiative. I'm excited to see how both the
jobs board and the certifications roll out. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's
AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.
