Brendan Foody

Silicon Valley startups and major AI labs are racing to build reinforcement learning environments for training AI agents, with Anthropic reportedly planning to spend over $1 billion on the technology.

“Quoted stating that few understand how large the opportunity around RL environments truly is”

Mercor hires domain experts like poets at premium rates ($150/hour) to create evaluation frameworks and training data for frontier AI models, enabling knowledge transfer at scale across billions of users.

“Founded Mercor at age 22, becoming the youngest unicorn founder ever; the company hires experts who train frontier AI models.”

Mercor has built a $10 billion marketplace connecting AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic with former employees from financial and consulting firms to obtain industry knowledge and train models, circumventing companies' reluctance to share proprietary data.

“Explained how AI labs use Mercor's marketplace to hire former employees from investment banks and consulting firms to train models on industry workflows without direct company data access.”