That makes complete sense to me. OpenAI is selling shovels and putting $$$ into improving and selling those shovels.
Salesforce (and other app builders) are buying those shovels (AI) to lower costs to build applications
Keeping this analogy, I guess it would be like not using shovels to build a shovel factory. Obviously, OpenAI needs a group of very talented experts, which are not getting replaced by AI soon, but they hire for all kinds of positions, including regular software engineers.
Even if OpenAI hires 1000 people this year at $1M salary each, that’s just $1B. This year they plan to spend $8.7B. People they hire are still competitive with their best models, so why not hire people?
Though I’ll be surprised if they’re still hiring two years from now.