AI model capabilities are not plateauing despite recent industry concerns
Brendan Foody · Mercor CEO & Co-Founder, Brendan Foody: How They Grew from $1M to $500M in 17 Months · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 15, 2025 · at 11:33
Brendan Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor. He responds to assertions from Cohere's founder that AI model capabilities are hitting scaling limits.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I don't think that Models are plateauing. Like, if we look at the last 12 months of progress in models, I've been blown away.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Brendan Foody
OpenAI or Anthropic Will Exceed $10 Trillion Valuation Within Five Years
“I could definitely see one of them being a 10 trillion dollar company maybe even significantly higher. It feels Like the opportunity associated with being the frontier model is so large that it will just like eat up so much of the other demand within the econo…”
Mercor scaled from $1M to $500M run rate in 17 months
“We scaled the business from one to five hundred million in the last 17 months, which is the fastest revenue growth of all time. One month faster than Cursor's time.”
Reinforcement learning environments will subsume the entire economy
“RL environments will subsume the entire economy, because it doesn't make sense that humans would be doing monotonous, redundant work.”
Scale AI lost its focus on product and quality
“But in some ways, scale lost the focus on product on scaling quality. And that was one of the largest challenges of the business.”
Tech companies will employ more software engineers in five years, not fewer
“I think more. And the reason is that engineering is such an elastic role, right? Where if we could build a hundred times more software or say we make engineers 10 times more efficient, We would probably build a hundred times more software, right? And so far as…”