The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work; The New York Times, July 10, 2026

  Lora Kelley , The New York Times; The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work

"Every day, Mercor, a start-up that sells training data to artificial intelligence companies, pays 30,000 contractors more than $4 million to help make their jobs, and those of their colleagues, obsolete.

It’s gig work, but for professionals with rarefied skills. One recent Mercor posting offered $225 an hour for a voice actor able to maintain a customer service persona in fluent Hebrew. Another sought a Ph.D. physicist with a specialization in general relativity, astrophysics or cosmology. A third listing wanted a physician with more than three years of experience in the Rwandan primary care medical system.

Mercor and a handful of similar start-ups are the primary middlemen in a supply chain of “human data” that may power the next generation of A.I. As OpenAI, Anthropic and other major ventures compete to become the industry’s dominant platform, the market for premium data that has been vetted by experts is exploding.

No longer do the A.I. companies need armies of low-paid workers, often overseas, to do rote tasks like tag images of cars or transcribe audio. They need mathematicians to annotate proofs, lawyers to mark up briefs and professors to grade essays. That’s what Mercor and its rivals supply. To use the parlance of the industry, data labeling has moved up the “value chain,” and the start-ups that offer this service have become some of the fastest growing in Silicon Valley."