The Data Market Moved From Crowdsourcing to Sourcing-and-Vetting Elite Experts
Insight
Foody reframes Mercor not as a body shop but as the company that caught a market transition: early LLMs were trained on cheap, low-skill crowdsourced data from Scale and Surge, but frontier post-training now needs Goldman and McKinsey caliber experts who can build data that researchers cannot even interpret on their own. He locates Mercor's takeoff in that engagement-model shift, sourcing and vetting elite talent that works directly with researchers, rather than in headcount or facilitation. It is the founding thesis the rest of the interview builds on.
Source Context
"There was this enormous transition underway, moving away from the crowdsourcing paradigm that Scale and Surge pioneered, of how do you get low- and medium-skilled people that write barely grammatically correct sentences for early LLMs, and very quickly moving towards this sourcing-and-vetting paradigm of how do you find the Goldman, the McKinsey analysts, the FANG software engineers, the top doctors and lawyers that can work directly with researchers to help them build the highest-complexity data on Earth." — 08:00(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzftvxA84z8&t=480s)
"It's really that trend around a different engagement model and higher-caliber work that caused us to take off and really catalyze this meteoric growth." — 09:00(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzftvxA84z8&t=540s)