Doctors, lawyers, investment bankers and journalists are moonlighting as AI trainers. Are they securing their spot in the AI-fueled future or signing their death sentence? That depends on who you ask.
Mercor, a gig-work platform that provides top white-collar talent to AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, has tens of thousands of such experts. According to a Bloomberg report, Mercor pays out more than $2 million per day to contractors, but some have called out an intrusive level of surveillance and being “treated like cattle.” (1)
Some are hailing AI training as the hot new version of gig work, yet others have called it a “scheme to misclassify workers. (2)” The very nature of contractor work is independent, meaning employers cannot tell individuals when to work and how that work gets done. Yet there are open cases regarding Mercor exercising the kind of control associated with an employer.
Ironically, the founders, who are in their early 20s, have never had traditional corporate jobs.
The 22-year-old founders who hail from the Bay Area are Thiel Fellows — members of the billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s program that provides $200,000 grants to young people who are skipping or quitting college (3). And they have become the youngest self-made billionaires. CEO Brendan Foody, CTO Adarsh Hiremath and board chairman Surya Midha each have a roughly 22% stake in the company, Forbes estimates (4).
“It’s definitely crazy,” Foody told Forbes. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.”
Mercor did not immediately respond to Moneywise’s request for comment.
Sundeep Peechu, managing partner at the VC firm Felicis Ventures, which led Mercor’s most recent funding rounds, commented on the category in the Bloomberg article.
He said the first era of data was from the internet, but for AI to become truly economically useful, humans must train the model on how they actually do the work.