How AI Is Being Trained to Do Your Job

**Ryan Knutson** (0:05)
There's a new type of gig work that's growing rapidly right now. It involves talking to AI and teaching it how to do your job.

**Katie Bindley** (0:14)
There is this new sort of category of jobs that basically involve people sitting in front of a computer and helping to train AI to perform some of the things that they are experts in or what they used to do in their careers pretty much.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:35)
Our colleague Katie Bindley covers tech and she's been reporting on a startup that's doing this kind of work.
It's hiring like crazy.
It's called Mercor.

**Katie Bindley** (0:45)
The best ways to get insights about this type of work is to just look at the job postings that are available. They put out a gazillion postings on LinkedIn.

**Ryan Knutson** (0:55)
Can we look at some of their LinkedIn posts?

**Katie Bindley** (0:57)
Let's.
You'll see tons of posts. Start your month with work from home. Explore flexible remote opportunities with Mercor and work from anywhere. Apply here. It'll basically say like we are looking to hire someone with experience as an investment banker, entry-level analyst or whatever, and it lays out specifically what they're looking for, and I think the idea is to help the AI perform the duties of those roles.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:23)
Are they ever looking for podcast hosts?

**Katie Bindley** (1:25)
I've seen ones for voice actors and stuff. I mean, the range of job postings, it's like hard to think of jobs that they're not hiring for. I mean, they were looking for dermatologists, radiologists, therapists, accountants, consultants, actors, I mean, screenwriters, all kinds of things.

**Ryan Knutson** (1:49)
Is there a metaphor that you could use for this phase of AI training? The first phase of training AI is like reading every book in the library.
And so now, going to sit down with a tutor, maybe?

**Katie Bindley** (2:00)
Yeah, I think actually a tutor is like a really good way to put it. It's certainly like moving us toward the direction of AI being able to handle more and more complex sort of white collar work related tasks.

**Ryan Knutson** (2:17)
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Thursday, June 4th.
Coming up on the show, the new gig work that's training AI to take your job.

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**Ryan Knutson** (3:24)
Mercor was founded in 2023 by three college dropouts. It's become a $10 billion company in less than three years.
It's basically a middleman between large AI companies and humans who can help train large language models.

**Katie Bindley** (3:39)
AI companies need a lot of data in order to improve their models. And the gist is that, you know, most if not all of the publicly available data has already been used. So, in order for the AI to get smarter, if you will, it needs fresh sources, fresh materials to train on, and humans turn out to be very good sources of that.
Mercor has clients. Their clients have included some of the biggest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic. And so, they're serving as sort of this go between, and Mercor hires the contractors. And so, then the contractors are the ones who are helping to improve the models.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:21)
One person who's worked as a contractor for Mercor is Carolina.

**Carolina Perez-Sanz** (4:25)
I'm Carolina Perez-Sanz.
I'm originally from Spain, from Madrid. I grew up in three languages, right? So, my parents are from Spain, but we lived in Lisbon, so my friends were Portuguese. And then I went to a French school. So, I grew up in three languages simultaneously. And I was always very interested in words.

**Ryan Knutson** (4:51)
Carolina came to the US over a decade ago, went to graduate school, and spent a big part of her career working as a speech and language pathologist.

**Carolina Perez-Sanz** (4:59)
So, what I did was I helped people for whom voice was their main job instrument, if you want. So, I helped journalists, reporters, TV and radio presenters, actors, singers, lawyers, everybody who needed to have a voice that sounded powerful.

**Ryan Knutson** (5:27)
Recently, while trying to grow her business, she started promoting her language and writing skills on LinkedIn. And it led her to a job she wasn't expecting, training AI.