While executives increasingly turn to AI to reduce headcount, the same CEOs perpetuating the AI jobs apocalypse argue “taste” could be a skill that gets you hired—and keeps your job secure.
A day before announcing OpenAI’s newest $110 billion funding round, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X to comment on how even non-technical people can contribute to the development of AI, or at least at his company. One of the best ways for these non-technical candidates to get their foot in the door is through research recruiting, Altman said.
His advice? Leverage the one thing AI has so far struggled to replicate: human judgement.
“We believe the best research teams are built through context, taste and a real feel for where the field is headed next,” he said.
Recruiting may be an especially good fit for candidates with “taste,” Altman implied, because their responsibilities at OpenAI include, “finding people who will move the frontier forward, not just filling roles.”
Altman is the latest high profile exec pointing to “taste” as a potential advantage for job seekers as well as the growing number of employees dealing with AI job anxiety. OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the same last week. “Taste is a new core skill,” he wrote in a post on X.
Other tech titans, including Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, have also recently echoed Altman’s thoughts that “taste” is going to be the next sought after skill.
Graham, known for his long essays on startups, economics, and the tech industry, was one of the first to comment on the importance of taste in a 2002 essay in which he claimed “taste” is not objective and that “we need good taste to make good things.”
In a post on X earlier this month, Graham expanded on his thoughts from two decades ago: “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” he predicted.
Cloudflare chief technology officer Dane Knecht wrote in reply to Graham’s post that he agreed with Graham, linking back to a post he made earlier this year in which he claimed taste will be the differentiator in engineering in 2026.
“Building is easy now. Knowing what to build, and what not to, is the hard part,” Knecht added.
But not everyone agrees that humans have the upper hand when it comes to judgement or taste. Matt Schumer, the co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, wrote in his viral essay on the future of AI earlier this month that OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex model felt, at least to him, capable of “something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste”
“I don’t see why “taste” and direction are uniquely human, like many people say. If an AI can train on it, it can learn it,” Schumer added in a later post on X.
Still, the conversation about “taste” is salient at a time when anxiety about the future of AI, and what it could mean for the job market, is front of mind for many workers.
On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said that the company was laying off 4,000 of its more than 10,000 workers, partly because of AI. The company has developed its own internal AI agent, called Goose, that can be powered by a range of different AI models and plug-in directly to a computer to draw from its files and folders as well as access cloud storage platforms and online databases, Wired reported.
The tool is already helping both programmers and non-programmers build out their ideas internally and develop apps or prototypes.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” wrote Dorsey in announcing the layoffs Thursday. “And that’s accelerating rapidly.”
