AI’s Next Job? Recruiting People To Train More AI

Forbes

Mercor, debuting on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, built an AI recruiter to interview job candidates. Along the way, it discovered a more immediate cash cow: finding humans to train AI models.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/09/03/ais-next-job-recruiting-people-to-train-more-ai/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, AI's Next Job, Recruiting People to Train More AI

00:05Sitting in a conference room at Mercore's office in San Francisco's South of Market District,

00:12CEO Brendan Foody recalls the day in June that changed everything.

00:17Meta had announced it was buying almost half of data-labeling giant Scale AI for $14 billion

00:23and poaching its star CEO Alexander Wang.

00:27Mercore, a smaller rival that recruits PhDs and other experts to train models for AI labs,

00:34saw an immediate opening.

00:36Foody tells Forbes, quote,

00:38I was initially surprised, then it slowly transitioned from surprise to excitement and enthusiasm around the future.

00:45His co-founder and CTO, Adarsh Hiramath, chimes in and says, quote,

00:50It just doesn't happen too often in startups where your biggest competitor gets torpedoed overnight.

00:57That's because scales tie up with Meta means many of the big AI labs, worried about a loss of neutrality,

01:04no longer want to work with them, the founders argue.

01:07During the conversation, Hiramath struggles to contain the excitement of his new pet,

01:11a six-week-old Bernese mountain dog named Zeus.

01:15The puppy's exuberant energy is an apt metaphor for Mercore itself,

01:19a company that has become one of the AI era's poster children for Silicon Valley's 20-something founders.

01:26At age 22, Mercore's leaders, Foody, Hiramath, and Surya Mida are all Thiel Fellows,

01:33members of conservative billionaire investor Peter Thiel's program,

01:37to dole out $100,000 grants every year to young people in exchange for foregoing college.

01:42The three longtime friends, who met on their Bay Area Suburbs high school debate team,

01:48started Mercore in 2023 before their fellowships.

01:52The buzzy startup, backed by heavy hitters including blue blood venture firm Benchmark,

01:57Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers,

02:02is a company in transition.

02:03Last month, it hired former Uber product chief Sundeep Jain as the startup's first president,

02:10the company told Forbes, injecting tech giant experience into the neophyte operation.

02:16Mercore will soon move to Instagram's old offices in downtown San Francisco,

02:20a bigger space for its fast-growing team.

02:23And this year, the company made its debut at number 89 on Forbes' Cloud 100 list,

02:28our ranking of the world's top private cloud computing companies, which was released last week.

02:34Even Mercore's primary business has changed, sort of.

02:38The company wasn't always focused on data labeling, and it's still not the long-term goal.

02:43Its original conception was modernizing recruiting with AI and high-tech matching algorithms.

02:48Mercore built a platform where applicants were interviewed by an AI avatar

02:52and placed with a company looking to hire talent, like a next-gen Deloitte or Accenture.

02:58Then, OpenAI's ChatGPT, released only a few weeks before Mercore's founding,

03:04touched off a race among the tech giants to train the most advanced AI models.

03:09Mercore, which means market in Latin, found its sweet spot staffing people to train those AI models

03:14and tilted the entire company in that direction.

03:18But don't call it a pivot, Foodie insists, saying Mercore still sees itself as a recruiter.

03:24Data labeling still fits with Mercore's core purpose of matching workers with companies.

03:29Whatever you call it, it's clearly paid off.

03:32In March, Mercore said it had $100 million in annualized revenue run rate

03:36and now tells Forbes it made $6 million in profit in the first half of the year.

03:42The company said it's grown nearly 60% every month for the past six months.

03:47Foodie declined to reveal how much of the business data labeling now represents,

03:51but said it's the, quote,

03:52The data labeling space is already crowded, even with scale's diminished stature.

03:59Surge, an older company founded in 2016, is reportedly valued at $25 billion.

04:06Turing AI, valued at $2.2 billion, raised $110 million in July.

04:13And Invisible, a smaller firm last valued at $500 million in 2023,

04:18has become a go-to partner for OpenAI and Microsoft.

04:22Foodie says Mercore stands out from the pack because of its focus on providing clients

04:27with highly skilled experts, like PhDs or lawyers,

04:30who typically make between $90 and $150 an hour.

04:34That type of expertise is necessary for training the most advanced reasoning models,

04:39which often need domain experts to teach them how to think through multi-step requests.

04:45For full coverage and to see the whole Cloud 100 list,

04:48check out Richard Nieva's piece on Forbes.com.

04:53This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

04:55Thanks for tuning in.

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