As business leaders increasingly use AI to cut staff numbers, the very CEOs driving this trend contend that having “taste” could be the skill that lands you a job—and ensures you keep it.
One day prior to unveiling OpenAI’s latest innovation, CEO Sam Altman remarked on how even individuals without technical backgrounds can aid AI development, at least within his firm. Altman stated that one of the top avenues for such candidates to gain entry is through research recruitment.
His recommendation? Capitalize on the one area where AI has yet to succeed: human judgment.
“We are convinced the finest research teams are formed through context, taste, and a genuine intuition for the field’s future direction,” he said.
Altman suggested recruitment might be a particularly suitable role for those with “taste,” as their duties at OpenAI involve “finding individuals who will advance the frontier, not merely occupying positions.”
Altman is the most recent prominent executive to highlight “taste” as a possible edge for workers, amid rising layoffs. OpenAI president Greg Brockman expressed a similar view last week, declaring in a post, “Taste is a new core skill.”
Other technology leaders, including Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham, have also recently mirrored Altman’s belief that “taste” is set to become the next in-demand ability.
Graham, renowned for his extensive essays on startups, economics, and tech, was among the first to discuss taste’s significance in a past essay. There, he asserted that “taste” is subjective and “we need good taste to make good things.”
In a post earlier this month, Graham elaborated on his ideas from twenty years prior: “In the AI era, taste will grow even more critical. When anyone can create anything, the major distinction is what you decide to create,” he forecasted.
Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, Dane Knecht, responded to Graham’s post, agreeing and referencing an earlier post of his own where he stated taste would be the key differentiator in engineering by 2026.
“Construction is simple now. Understanding what to build, and what to avoid, is the difficult part,” Knecht further noted.
However, not all concur that humans hold an advantage in judgment or taste. Matt Schumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, wrote in his recent newsletter on AI’s future that OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex model seemed, to him, capable of “something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste.”
“I fail to see why ‘taste’ and direction are exclusively human, as many claim. If an AI can be trained on it, it can master it,” Schumer stated in a subsequent post on X.
Nevertheless, the discussion on “taste” is especially relevant now, as the potential for widespread AI-driven job displacement is a primary concern for many employees.
On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced the company would cut 4,000 of its over 10,000 staff, partially due to AI. The firm has created an internal AI agent, named Goose, which can utilize various AI models and connect directly to a computer to access its files and folders, along with cloud storage and online databases, according to Wired.
This tool is already assisting both programmers and non-programmers within the company to flesh out ideas and create applications or prototypes.
“We are already observing that the intelligent tools we are developing and employing, combined with leaner and more streamlined teams, are facilitating a novel way of working that fundamentally alters what it means to construct and manage a company,” Dorsey said in the layoff announcement. “And this is speeding up quickly.”