When The People Training AI Are Training Themselves Out Of A Job

Every day, a three-year-old startup called Mercor pays more than 30,000 contractors upward of $4 million to help make their own jobs, and the jobs of their colleagues, obsolete. That figure was first reported by The New York Times in July 2026, and it says a lot about where this business has gone in three years. The contractors on Mercor’s books aren’t clicking through simple image-tagging tasks. Recent postings have called for a voice actor who can hold a customer-service persona in fluent Hebrew, a physicist specializing in general relativity, and a physician with specific experience in the Rwandan primary care system.

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