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.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
- 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
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