The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 58 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Foody: Investor Spread False Rumors of China Accessing Mercor Data
“Think of one person that's very prominent who's invested in multiple competitors and just, like, made this tweet about how all of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue.”
AI Models Will Clone End-to-End SaaS Apps Within 12 Months
“Those capabilities are going to exist in the models in the next 12 months.”
Foody: Most businesses will spend more on AI tokens than headcount
“And I think most businesses are going to look like that.”
Meta Offered an AI Candidate $20 Million Per Year in Cash
“There was someone I was hiring the other day, and he had an offer for twenty million dollars in cash per year from TBD, and like that's the kind of stuff we run into on a regular basis.”
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.”
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…”
Foody: Top AI researchers cost tens of millions in stock annually
“Oftentimes, it would be in the tens of millions of stock per year.”
Foody: Mercor did not lose OpenAI as a customer after hack
“False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever.”
Foody: There will be significantly more jobs in 10 years
“I believe there's certainly going to be many more jobs in 10 years than there are today.”
Foody: Training AI agents will become a massive new job category
“One of the largest things that people underestimate both in the context of AI labs as well as within the enterprise is how significant of a job category it is going to be to train agents.”
Foody: Mercor operates at 30% to 40% gross margin
“So the revenue is between a 30 and 40% gross margin, but the key distinction and why it's not GMV, but it's revenue, is that the experts are actually only one part of the broader value chain that we deliver to customers.”
Foody: Millions of people will soon be hired to train AI on workplace tasks
“And so there's this enormous mobilization of hundreds of thousands and soon millions of people to build out the full distribution of everything that you could pass into Google Workspace and everything that you could want out on the other side in every job cate…”
Felicis Offered Mercor $10B Valuation at $400M ARR
“By September of 20, 25 or say October, we were at called four hundred million in revenue run rate. And then Felisa's was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet at a ten billion dollar valuation.”
Foody: AI infrastructure companies will achieve higher margins than application startups
“And so I think that There are going to be high margins that get achieved at the infrastructure layer and sort of sustainable, profitable businesses in a way that it's less immediately clear at the application layer.”
Foody: Software companies lacking network effects will struggle due to AI
“The companies that don't have network effects are going to struggle very significantly because then there's not really a defensible moat in the pure software associated with the products that they build.”
Foody: Enterprises will build evaluation systems to commoditize AI model providers
“And I believe that over time, this is going to develop to look very similar across every fortune, where they'll need to have this system of record for evaluating and specifying agent behavior across every workflow in their business. And they're going to use th…”
Foody: The AI model API layer will get commoditized
“So I think the key distinction is that I think the API layer will get commoditized.”
Enterprises Will Spend More on Compute Than Headcount Within Five Years
“I don't know about 24 months time, but I would bet that in five years the average enterprise spends more on compute than headcount.”
Majority of AI Inference Will Run on Open-Source or Distilled Models
“I think that majority of inference in five years is going to be using a open source or custom fine-tuned or distilled model, not using a frontier model.”
Foody: NVIDIA will lose its monopoly in five years but remain most valuable
“And so I would guess that in five years, it doesn't feel like Nvidia has quite the same monopoly, but that's okay, because even if they only have 30 or 40% market share in the largest market in the world by far, that is the world's most valuable company.”
Foody: AI researcher compensation will normalize as training skills spread
“So I think that it'll probably continue to escalate for the people that, for a smaller group of people. But I also suspect that as more people gain knowledge of how these labs operate and what the capabilities of how to train a frontier model That means that t…”
Mercor hit a nine-figure run rate and quadrupled post-Scale deal
“We were already at a nine-figure revenue run rate, and the company quadrupled since the scale acquisition.”
Mercor pays $95 per hour compared to $30 at Scale and Surge
“Our average marketplace pay rate is 95 dollars an hour to put that in frame of reference, scale and search generally pay about 30 dollars an hour.”
AI labs eventually consolidate almost all human data spend to Mercor
“We've definitely found those stories of customers where I think they start out multi-vendoring, working with a bunch of different customers, with different vendors, but ultimately get to the point where they realize that they're going to be making a trade-off …”
AI models will still require human training data in ten years
“I very much believe so, and the reason is that the question comes down to when we'll have super intelligence. Once we have super intelligence and models are better than humans at everything, then, of course, that means that humans won't be able to contribute t…”
Foody: Twitter perception of Mercor breach was far worse than internal reality
“There was this broad perception on Twitter that was much more exaggerated than what actually happened within the business.”
Frontier AI Task Automation Rose From 1% to 40% in 12 Months
“On Apex, the Frontier model right now is at about 40%, and 12 months ago the Frontier model was a one, which was scoring one percent.”
Foody: Mercor daily payouts will triple to $9M in 12 months
“In 12 months time, that's probably about triple that.”
Foody: AI models will clean enterprise data as reasoning capabilities rise
“They'll be able to clean the data themselves fairly effectively as reasoning capabilities go up.”
Foody: AI models will execute complex multi-week long-horizon tasks within 6-12 months
“Those are the kinds of tasks that we need to be building to push the frontier of research and evaluation so that those are the capabilities that people are able to use in the models in six to 12 months.”
Felicis Offered Mercor $2B Valuation at $20M ARR
“We're at twenty million in revenue. They ask us, what valuation do we think makes most sense? And I say one to two billion dollars. So they give us a term sheet at a two billion dollar valuation.”
Foody: Mercor has demand to double overnight but lacks capacity
“Like we have the demand to Double overnight. We just don't have the capacity.”
Foody: Enterprise AI API switching costs are zero due to continuous benchmarking
“Because the switching costs are zero. Like when the switching costs are zero, that means that, and there's a new frontier model every two months. That means that we very quickly are going to swap them out.”
Foody: US AI talent aggregation will continue driving major geopolitical advantage
“I think that it's going to be difficult to change because there's just so many strong network effects around talent, right? When we have the best talent, even I know so many Brilliant French researchers that go to work at OpenAI and dropping in DeepMind, right…”
US AI Labs Will Hire 10,000 French Lawyers to Defeat Sovereign Models
“That said, the labs are just going to hire 10,000 people in France to teach the models how to be better at French law. And I don't think that there's so much that others are going to be able to do to stop that because The transfer learning capabilities from al…”
Mercor has enough demand to double overnight if capacity allows
“We have the demand to, like, double overnight if we can meet capacity.”
Scale AI used Mercor's platform to hire thousands of workers
“Scale AI came to us and they used our platform to hire thousands of people.”
Mercor is growing faster at $500M run rate than ever before
“In fact, the company is growing faster now at 500 than it's ever grown before, and so the growth continues accelerating.”
Mercor will likely complete a low-dilution financing round soon
“I think that it's likely we'll do a financing soon to answer your question with low dilution, largely because there's a lot of benefits to signaling ourselves as the market leader and RL environments and all of the high complexity data that we produce.”
Extraordinary AI startups built today will look cheap in ten years
“It wouldn't shock me if, like, we feel like things are frothy and it's a crazy time, but if we're evaluating things on a ten-year time horizon all of these extraordinary businesses that are being built will look like a discount”
Sovereign AI models will not become the largest general-purpose players
“Maybe wins in a scoped part of the market. Like, I could see why, for example there would be a lot of benefits to having Mistral be an expert in European law that might have nuances from other kinds of law, and they've just invested far more in having the best…”
Mercor never mandated 996 work hours for its employees
“Well, not exactly. I need to offer a key clarification, which is that we've actually never mandated hours. It was more so when we were talking about nine nine six, it was a description of how the early team worked. Like, in fact, the reason we talked about nin…”
Foody: Enormous boom coming in AI security engineering tools
“And so I think there's going to be An enormous boom in AI security engineering tools and various forms of defense that are able to help protect companies against all of the increasing waves of cyber incidents that are just getting started.”
Foody: Mercor Has a Talent Network of Over Five Million People
“When we have this talent network of over five million people that are able to refer their friends, it's just so much easier for us to find the marginal doctor because we have that enormous talent network that can refer us to their friends.”