The AI Talent Wars Have Hit Data Labeling |
Early this week, employees at micro1, a startup that supplies training data to AI labs, began receiving unsolicited recruitment messages from rival Mercor. “Happy to keep this confidential, given the sensitivity of the situation. Let me know if you have ten minutes to chat tonight,” read one, sent this week and viewed by Forbes.
The notes often opened with canned recruitment language —“I’m extremely impressed with your work” —but escalated quickly. The Mercor representative said the company was prepared to “move fast” and make an “extremely aggressive offer” on top of already generous pay packages: cash signing bonuses of $500,000, $1 million, and in some cases as much as $2 million.
Talent wars have become a familiar feature of the AI boom, with elite AI researchers commanding sports-star pay packages. What’s new is just how far they seem to be spreading to what is perhaps the industry’s most unglamorous corner: companies that provide AI training data to big labs like OpenAI, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic. Perhaps more surprising than the fat salaries is the target audience: not just AI researchers and engineers, but project........