- The startup Mercor pays more than 4 million USD daily to around 30,000 contractors to generate training data that helps AI perform human professional tasks.
- The demand has shifted from simple data labeling to specialized expertise, featuring roles such as lawyers, doctors, professors, mathematicians, and physicists.
- Some positions are highly compensated, including Hebrew voice actors at 225 USD per hour, experienced doctors in Rwanda, and specialized physics PhDs.
- Mercor, alongside Scale AI and Handshake, has become a critical link providing expert data to AI firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.
- Founded in 2023, Mercor was valued at 10 billion USD in October last year and is currently in talks for a new funding round at a valuation of around 20 billion USD.
- Meta has invested over 14 billion USD in Scale AI, while Handshake reached an annual revenue run rate of over 1 billion USD in April, up from 550 million USD at the beginning of the year.
- These companies are capitalizing on the virtually unlimited demand for high-quality data to upgrade AI models.
- However, the business model faces risks once AI masterfully learns a domain and no longer requires extensive training data from humans.
- To reduce dependence on a few large clients, these startups are expanding from collecting individual data to digitizing the processes and knowledge of entire enterprises.
- Mercor CEO Brendan Foody believes that capturing the operational knowledge of enterprises is currently the biggest bottleneck for AI labs to automate almost all human tasks.
- 📌 Conclusion: The paradox of the AI wave: experts are highly compensated to impart knowledge that helps AI replace their own professions. With 30,000 contractors receiving over 4 million USD daily, Mercor and its rivals are capitalising on the booming demand for expert data. However, as AI becomes increasingly proficient, the demand for this specific type of data may decline, forcing companies to shift toward capturing the knowledge and processes of entire enterprises to sustain growth.
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