Key ideas from Brendan Foody

• Mercor pays poets $150/hour to create rubrics and evaluations for training AI models in creative domains
• AI Productivity Index shows 25-30% annual improvement in model performance on economically valuable tasks, with GPT-5 scoring 64%
• "Models are advancing very quickly at automating 50-75% of expert tasks, but will struggle with that last 25%" - Brendan
• Mercor has grown to 300+ employees and is potentially the fastest company to reach $400 million valuation
• Future knowledge workers will primarily train AI models rather than perform tasks directly, creating new job categories
• "I think software engineers are extremely price elastic - if we make them 10x more efficient, we'll have 10x more engineers" - Brendan
• Brendan believes AI models will write poems as good as median Pablo Neruda within less than a year
• The company uses its own AI technology to automate resume screening and interview processes for hiring