Three-year-old startup Mercor has become a $10 billion middleman in AI’s data gold rush. The company connects AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with former employees of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and white-shoe law firms, paying them up to $200 an hour to share their industry expertise and train the AI models that could eventually automate their former employers out of business.
Today we’re bringing you a conversation with CEO Brendan Foody from this year’s Disrupt, where he explained why AI labs need high-skilled contractors instead of crowdsourced labor, how Scale AI’s troubles accelerated Mercor’s rise, and why he thinks the entire economy will converge on training AI agents.
- How Foody went from AWS credit consulting in high school to a $10 billion valuation
- Why the top 10-20% of contractors drive the majority of model improvement, and how Mercor finds them
- The gray area between employee knowledge and corporate secrets (and whether Goldman Sachs should be worried)
- Why Foody believes all knowledge work will eventually become training data for AI agents
Source: Techcrunch
