A common proclamation made by tech leaders is that while artificial intelligence will destroy jobs, it will also create many new ones. But what kinds of new careers will AI spark? And, more importantly, will they last?
Few spell out what will replace the swathes of white-collar roles that could be automated out of existence in the coming years. New forms of employment such as AI researchers and prompt engineers are few and far between. And data from the World Economic Forum suggests that although there will be a net increase of 78 million jobs from around now till 2030, the fastest growth will be in roles including farmworkers, delivery drivers and construction workers — all driven by demographic shifts rather than a productivity boom from AI.
In an ideal world, AI would trigger something similar to the automation of automobile manufacturing in the early 20th Century, when the knock-on effect of more cars led to booms in other parts of the economy like transportation and retailing, even as skilled craftspeople were replaced. Daron Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2024, says in the book Power and Progress that current AI trends skew more heavily towards cost-cutting; with some AI tools only doing a nominally better job than humans — like customer-service bots — the resulting productivity gains are minor. The creation of new jobs also looks less likely.
Yet there is one clear example of “new work” being triggered by AI: professional trainers for the software models. Several startups with names like Surge AI (valued last year at $25 billion) and Turing (valued at $2.2 billion, according to Pitchbook) populate a new market hiring white-collar professionals to train AI systems, usually as contractors, to form a new kind of office-worker gig economy. Among the biggest is Mercor.io Corp., founded in 2023 in San Francisco and valued at $10 billion, and frequently named as one of the fastest growing startups in AI.
Around 30,000 people from a wide range of disciplines — lawyers, doctors, financial consultants, cooks, osteopaths — are paid hourly by Mercor to train AI models to become more proficient in those fields, often for clients like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Mercor plans to grow its contractor base “by many orders of magnitude,” founder and Chief Executive Officer Brendan Foody tells me.
Foody, who is 22 and a graduate of the coveted Thiel Fellowship program, says he’s been fascinated by labor markets since high school. To chase rocket-ship growth he limits some meetings, like our interview, to an efficient 15 minutes and requires customer-facing staff to work six days a week, with the option to work from home on Saturdays. The company automates its recruitment process for contractors, screening new recruits through AI-powered video interviews.
Their work is done in secret, protected by hefty non-disclosure agreements, and is technically challenging. Contractors sometimes create scoring guides known as “evals” or “rubrics,” which are then used to teach AI models and evaluate their responses, a bit like designing the bar exam to test human lawyers. Grim and paradoxical as it seems to train an AI that could replace you, Mercor’s contractors say the pay is excellent. One of them, who declined to be identified, told me they’ll never make as much money as they are right now.
