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 16 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Mercor scaled from $1M to $400M revenue run rate in 16 months
“We grew from one to four hundred million in revenue run rate in 16 months, and it's been an extraordinary journey and super exciting.”
Foody: The entire economy will likely become an RL environment machine
“It speaks to conversations I've had with a lot of researchers and executives at top labs, which is that it's highly likely that the entire economy will become an RL environment machine.”
Foody: Success measurement bottlenecks economy-wide AI automation
“And so in many ways, the barrier to applying agents to the entire economy To automate every workflow is how do we measure success? How do we eval it and write the PRDs for everything that we want agents to do, which Mercore is obviously a huge part of doing.”
Foody: Some Fortune 500s fear evaluating AI automation in their businesses
“There are certain enterprises we talk to that are almost like fearful, not wanting to engage, not wanting to, you know, eval their businesses because that'll provide the evidence that their value chain is being automated. And there's others that, I mean, liter…”
Foody: Human AI eval work will last as long as human advantages
“And I think that that road to improving models will last for as long as there is anything in the economy that humans can do, which models can't, and be a huge portion of what the future of work looks like.”
Foody: Traditional expert networks struggle to meet AI post-training demands
“One core difference is that alpha sites would generally be a one-off call versus a lot of our work is really hiring people for projects, right? Of how do they work on something for a longer period of time? And so that That's, I think, one of the reasons that s…”
Mercor had no sales or marketing personnel for its first 18 months
“For the last year and a half of the business, we've had no one in sales and marketing.”
Foody: Software automation will create a unified global labor market within 10 years
“When we're able to Automate that matching problem at the cost of software. It makes way for this global unified labor market that every candidate applies to and every company hires from facilitating a perfect flow of information in the economy. And I think tha…”
Foody: Mercor is lifetime profitable and has never burned net capital
“We bootstrapped the company to a million dollar revenue run rate and have always remained super capital efficient. Like we've never burned money. We were lifetime profitable.”
Foody: Top 10% of human evaluators drive majority of model improvement
“And there's also this really interesting dynamic where in a set of a hundred people that we hire, oftentimes the top 10% of people will drive majority of the model improvement.”
Mercor's median AI trainer pay is $95/hr, reaching up to $500/hr
“I mean, so our median pay rate in the marketplace is 95 dollars an hour, but it can flex up well up into like 500 dollars an hour based on the depth of someone's expertise.”
Mercor hit its $50M run rate forecast two weeks after pitching
“Where I remember when we were talking to Benchmark before they led our series A, we were at 1.5 million in run rate. And I said we'd be at fifty million in run rate by the end of the year. And they said we were absolutely insane, right? As anyone, anyone would…”
Foody: Tens of thousands work on AI post-training at any given time
“Tens of thousands at any given time, hundreds of thousands more generally. I mean, it's huge. And the most exciting thing is that it's growing really quickly.”
Foody: Traditional AI crowdsourcing platforms typically pay around $30 per hour
“If you look at the economics of the crowdsourcing companies, oftentimes they would pay like 30 dollars an hour to town as sort of the average.”
Mercor hires Harvard Lampoon staff and Emmy winners to train AI
“Like we hired all the people from the Harvard Lampoon a couple of months ago, their comedy club to help with making models funnier. And so do all sorts of stuff like that, hiring Emmy award-winning screenwriters and everything across the board on creative capa…”