Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)
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The wealthiest companies in the world are willing to spend whatever it takes to improve model capabilities. - We're entering the era of Evals. - We started working with all the top AI labs. What the labs need is a labor marketplace. They actually need extraordinary professionals that can measure model capabilities. - I found this pocket maybe the biggest business opportunity in history. - We grew from one to 400 million in revenue run rate in 16 months fastest ascent in history. - Why is this so valuable? - The market is bound by the amount of things where humans can do something that models can. The labs primary bottleneck to improve models is how they can effectively have some way of measuring what success looks like for the model. - There's a tweet that you retweeted. If you really think about it, we were put on earth to create reinforcement learning, training, data for labs. - It's highly likely that the entire economy will become an oral environment machine. Building out all of these worlds and contexts, and I think the narrative in AI over the last three years has almost entirely been one of job displacement. But very few companies and people have talked about this new category of jobs that's being created. - They talked to a lot of people about what should I be studying? Where should I be? Getting better. - How can they leverage this technology to do so much more? We'll give people interviews where we say use whatever tools are available to build a website and let's see what product you're able to build in an hour. - Today, my guest is Brendan Foodie, CEO and co-founder of Mircore. Mircore is the fastest growing company in history to go from one to $500 million in revenue. They did this in 17 months, less than a year and a half. Brendan is also the youngest unicorn founder ever. They just raised $100 million at $2 billion valuation. Mircore, if you haven't heard of them, helps AI labs and AI companies hire experts to help them train their models using AI. They've never had a customer turn.
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