Brendan Foody, the CEO and cofounder of Mercor, said the company is paying over $1.5 million daily to contractors who are training AI.
Mercor, which recruits teams of human experts to train AI models, including for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, recently completed a funding deal at a $10 billion valuation, the company said Monday.
“The company has been growing like crazy,” Foody said on the TBPN show following the valuation news.
Mercor is one of several startups that have been enlisted by Big Tech companies to help train their AI models using teams of human contractors.
The company said in a LinkedIn post on Monday that it currently has over 30,000 contractors. Foody told TBPN that a lot of investment is coming from the fields of software engineering, finance, law, and medicine.
In a blog post about the latest funding round, Foody described humans training AI as a “new category of work.”
“Millions of people will spend the next decade teaching machines the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess,” Foody wrote in a blog post published on Monday. “Instead of doing predictable work repeatedly, they’ll teach agents how to do it once, so the agent can do it a million times.”
Foody told TBPN that an IPO for Mercor is “potentially on the horizon,” but did not specify a date.
Foody did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Training AI chatbots is tech’s new gold rush
Tech’s latest gold rush is getting humans to train AI chatbots.
Workers can earn up to $100 an hour training AI chatbots, from meme specialists coaching xAI’s chatbot Grok to understand internet culture to contractors tutoring it in everything from Japanese to finance.
Startups connecting these human trainers to AI labs are raising money at soaring valuations, and minting some of America’s youngest billionaires.
Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen, 37, is worth $18 billion, while Scale AI’s cofounders Alexandr Wang, 28, and Lucy Guo, 30, have fortunes of $3.2 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, according to Forbes.
In a report published last month, Business Insider spoke with more than 60 data labelers worldwide. Several freelancers told Business Insider they have earned thousands of dollars a month training chatbots, although the work can be monotonous, chaotic, and disturbing.
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