{"id":36758,"date":"2025-10-28T08:01:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T08:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/mercor-pays-over-1-5-million-a-day-to-humans-training-ai-says-its-ceo\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T08:01:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T08:01:19","slug":"mercor-pays-over-1-5-million-a-day-to-humans-training-ai-says-its-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/mercor-pays-over-1-5-million-a-day-to-humans-training-ai-says-its-ceo\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercor pays over $1.5 million a day to humans training AI, says its CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69002198c007ca8c2737bbba?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Brendan Foody\"\/><figcaption>Brendan Foody, the CEO of Mercor, said an IPO could be on the horizon.<\/p>\n<p>Taylor Hill\/FilmMagic\/Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Mercor pays out over $1.5 million a day to humans it enlists to train AI models.<\/li>\n<li>Mercor recently secured a funding deal that valued the company at $10 billion.<\/li>\n<li>Mercor has over 30,000 contractors, and its clients include major tech firms.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Brendan Foody, the CEO and cofounder of Mercor, said the company is paying over $1.5 million daily to contractors who are training AI.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The company has been growing like crazy,&quot; Foody said on the TBPN show following the valuation news.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>In a blog post about the latest funding round, Foody described humans training AI as a &quot;new category of work.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Millions of people will spend the next decade teaching machines the judgment, nuance, and taste that only humans possess,&quot; Foody wrote in a blog post published on Monday. &quot;Instead of doing predictable work repeatedly, they&#039;ll teach agents how to do it once, so the agent can do it a million times.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Foody told TBPN that an IPO for Mercor is &quot;potentially on the horizon,&quot; but did not specify a date.<\/p>\n<p>Foody did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n<h2>Training AI chatbots is tech&#039;s new gold rush<\/h2>\n<p>Tech&#039;s latest gold rush is getting humans to train AI chatbots.<\/p>\n<p>Workers can earn up to $100 an hour training AI chatbots, from meme specialists coaching xAI&#039;s chatbot Grok to understand internet culture to contractors tutoring it in everything from Japanese to finance. <\/p>\n<p>Startups connecting these human trainers to AI labs are raising money at soaring valuations, and minting some of America&#039;s youngest billionaires.<\/p>\n<p>Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen, 37, is worth $18 billion, while Scale AI&#039;s cofounders Alexandr Wang, 28, and Lucy Guo, 30, have fortunes of $3.2 billion and $1.4 billion, respectively, according to Forbes.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><em>Have a tip? Contact these reporters via email at <\/em><em>kvlamis@businessinsider.com<\/em><em>, <\/em><em>cmlee@insider.com<\/em><em>, or Signal at @kelseyv.21, @cmlee.81. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here&#039;s our <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/insider-guide-to-securely-sharing-whistleblower-information-about-powerful-institutions-2021-10\" rel=\"noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\"><em>guide to sharing information securely<\/em><\/a><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Brendan Foody, the CEO of Mercor, said an IPO could be on the horizon. Taylor Hill\/FilmMagic\/Getty Images Mercor pays out over $1.5 million a day to humans it enlists to train AI models. Mercor recently secured a funding deal that valued the company at $10 billion. Mercor has over 30,000 contractors, and its clients include [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36759,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}