At first Lola thought the job ads were fake. Promising $90 per hour for remote work in fields from consultancy to philosophy, the roles circulating in her former classmates’ WhatsApp groups seemed too good to be true.
When the business graduate started at Silicon Valley start-up Mercor, the paychecks were real. But the job had one stark difference to her usual management consultancy projects. Rather than corporations, her clients were the AI models of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Her role was to train the AI to do the consulting work she is qualified in.
“It’s training the LLM [large language models] to do the job,” says Lola, who asked to use a pseudonym due to terms in her contract. In a tough labour market, she finds the work interesting and preferable to none. But the thought of future job displacement worries her. “At the start [my graduating class and I] didn’t really think about it, but working with this kind of model we now have the sense that it could be scary . . . in terms of [future] unemployment.”