Mercor says the average pay of its AI experts is $110 an hour

Mercor, a marketplace that puts professionals with AI labs, pays experts to write tests and to grade answers of AI models. The company told Bloomberg that the average pay of its workers is $110 an hour. Its legal listing pays $60 to $150 an hour. Handshake, a student career network, lists a maximum of $200 an hour for a physician.

How it works

An expert writes a legal problem. The expert also writes the correct answer, and a model must give the same answer. Experts also grade work that a model writes, for example if a citation shows that a point is correct. The output becomes training data or test data.

The numbers

Prolific, a British data platform, says that experts are 30% of its participants. Handshake pays a lawyer $90 to $110 an hour for work. Researchers at Scale AI, a rival data vendor, found that grading rules from experts improve models more than grading rules from AI only.

Open questions

It is a research question if the work improves models. Mercor ended the contract of one worker in March, and a Slack message told the worker. Seven or more class action lawsuits came after a data breach at Mercor. Mercor disputes the claims.

Insight: Mercor adds training software to its experts

Mercor sells the work of experts. On July 9, Mercor said that it will buy Deeptune, a startup that makes practice software for AI agents. In August, Nvidia talked about a funding round with a value of $20 billion for Mercor. This reads as a move to hold the experts and the software that AI labs buy from one vendor. Leaders who buy AI must find who wrote the tests.