OpenAI Unleashes “Project Mercury” to Take Over Wall Street (Analysts Are Cooked)

Somewhere in San Francisco, Sam Altman just looked at a 23-year-old analyst in a blue suit and thought, we can do better.

Sam Altman is back on his bullsh*t as OpenAI has quietly hired over 100 former investment bankers to train its models how to build financial models… including spreadsheets, pitch decks, and midnight versions of Excel hell that define junior banking life. The operation, called Project Mercury, pays $150 an hour to ex-Goldman (Lord help us) and ex-JPM analysts to feed GPT examples of mergers, IPOs, and restructurings… effectively teaching AI how to handle the grunt work that makes entire analyst classes question their religion. 

(Source: Giphy) 

Translation: This is a strange full-circle moment. Why? Because the same people who once spent 90 hours a week formatting fonts for VPs are now training the software that will make that job unnecessary. And if you didn’t think 2025 couldn’t get any weirder… the initial setup for Project Mercury takes the cake. For instance, candidates apply by interviewing with a chatbot. Let me say that again for the people in the back: Not an actual person… and actual legit chatbot. From there, they model deals, fix the output, and resubmit until it passes review… then get paid. It’s mechanical, repetitive, and devoid of human interaction. And yet, in other words… perfect practice for investment banking.

(Source: Yahoo Finance) 

The difference is that OpenAI’s version doesn’t pretend to be mentorship. It’s pure data extraction…  take what analysts know, turn it into prompts, and watch the system learn to mimic their judgment. But why exactly is Sam Altman horned up over this? Because the goal is to quite literally take market share from Wall Street (it’s not that plain as day… but that’s the gist). By successfully extracting investment bankers greed glands in financial modeling… OpenAI will end up replacing the entire front half of an analyst's role. And that’s the power play. 

Another key point here is that despite being worth half a trillion dollars, OpenAI still doesn’t make real money. Mercury is the first step toward fixing that: build AI products that companies actually pay for. For instance, banks spend billions each year on labor that could be replaced by something faster, cheaper, and incapable of unionizing. Meaning, they’ll 100% buy whatever Altman is cooking up with Project Mercury.  Especially because, if there’s one thing banks love more than leverage, it’s firing juniors while calling it efficiency.

(Source: Giphy) 

Now of course, while the analyst job is becoming more of a relic than a “status quo”, the hierarchy won’t disappear, it’ll just shift. The new analysts will be prompt engineers. The new VPs will manage automation pipelines. And somewhere in the corner, a managing director will still send an email that says, “pls fix.” LOL. Which means… which means… OpenAI isn’t trying to destroy investment banking… it’s trying to perfect it. And honestly, that might be worse. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.