As Amazon lets Mechanical Turk fade, Mercor hits a $2B gross run rate

Definitely lucrative to take a 30% cut of your fleet of staff, in exchange for being a seal of quality. Not yet clear how effective trying to "distil" them into models is going to be?

Re: As Amazon lets Mechanical Turk fade, Mercor hits a $2B gross run rate

#6

Post by vidarh » Tue, Jul 07, 2026, 12:36 PM UTC

ElProlactin wrote: post #3

I can't help but wonder: what true "domain specialists" would work as hourly contractors to train AI that will replace them? I suspect the answer is: the people who have already lost their jobs.

I have done work for other providers in that space. The pay rates vary massively, and on the high end (providers requiring MSc's or PhD's and doing testing) they are high enough that if you're a freelancer and have dead time it can be worth picking up an hour here and there. The most lucrative project I picked up was actually worth putting aside contract work for, as I was able to negotiate a rate and they paid per task and I was far faster than their benchmark and the end result was it beat my reasonably high day rate by a good margin.

But, sure, I suspect a good number of the people doing this work has either lost a job or are in low cost countries.

Re: As Amazon lets Mechanical Turk fade, Mercor hits a $2B gross run rate

#7

Post by xtajv » Thu, Jul 09, 2026, 9:02 PM UTC

ElProlactin wrote: post #3

I can't help but wonder: what true "domain specialists" would work as hourly contractors to train AI that will replace them? I suspect the answer is: the people who have already lost their jobs.

I would consider it, if I were being paid royalties on the end product, rather than a one-time hourly fee.