White collar workers are getting paid $200 an hour to train AI on their jobs — but it’s not ‘easy money’ Amanda Brown grades biology students as an assistant professor at Tarleton State University in Texas.
Last summer, while she wasn’t teaching, she signed up to grade an AI model’s answers
What followed were tight deadlines, flat-rate gigs that swallowed far more hours than they paid for and her manager giving a verdict that her work didn’t measure up, with no reasons provided. Must Read “It seems like easy money,” Brown told The New York Times. “It really isn’t.” Brown is one of tens of thousands of white-collar professionals now being paid to teach AI systems the jobs they spent years learning. A July 10 Times report (1) put numbers on the trade, showing how Mercor, a San Francisco-based startup that sells training data to AI labs, pays its network of 30,000 contractors upward of $4 million every day (1).
Mercor was reportedly in early talks in July that would peg its worth near $20 billion (2), according to Bloomberg. Whether the work is worth it is a harder question now, and the people doing it have started answering. What the work pays and who’s buying The money sounds good.