A New White-Collar Gig Economy: Training AI To Take Over (bloomberg.com)
- Reference: 0179986260
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/11/06/1824257/a-new-white-collar-gig-economy-training-ai-to-take-over
- Source link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-06/ai-startups-creating-new-gig-economy-for-bankers-lawyers
Some contractors are former employees of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Others moonlight in this work while keeping their regular jobs. Brendan Foody, Mercor's 22-year-old CEO, acknowledged at a conference last week that trade secrets could potentially be compromised given the volume of work submitted. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on this week's earnings call that some AI training gigs on its platform require PhDs.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-11-06/ai-startups-creating-new-gig-economy-for-bankers-lawyers
Training their replacement? (Score:2)
"Training their replacement" is hardly a new thing. The only real question is how long until people are getting laid off, but get 3 months extra health insurance only if they brain-dump-train the AI replacement on their way out.
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More like dig your own grave.
I'm in (Score:2)
Just spent an hour trying to get Gemini CLI trying to get to do something in PowerShell. Failed in the end.
Would love to be able to get paid to do the same.
Re: I'm in (Score:2)
Across three days, posing the same question about paginating the results of a powershell tool that interacted with AD, Gemini hallucinated four different command line arguments that didn't exist.
This is exactly how you expect a statistical prediction model to work.
This is exactly what you don't want in a coding assistant.
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I spent two hours typing nothing but English to get a working web app out that grabbed multiple selectable data streams at settable regular time intervals and made adjustable and downloadable warning sounds depending on adjustable rates of change. Most of the time I spend waiting on the AI to think about it, and spent some time testing and reporting errors or better ways for it to work. It took about 1/2 hour total of my concentration, and cost me $10. At no point did I see any code (I could download it, th
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And now you have a hopeless insecure and unmaintainable mess that very likely doesn't actually work correctly or consistently.
Again, AI can't actually write code. All it does is produce text that looks like code. It can not reason. It can not consider alternatives. All it can do is generate text that is similar to other text where someone described their reasoning or considered alternatives. You're not "getting a peek into their inner workings", you're just generating text probabilistically. It produc
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No, I have a working app that reliably does what I asked it to do. I didn't want to maintain it or update it, I just wanted a small app that just works. Stating completely false information about what I did while you have exactly zero knowledge of it is idiotic. It's been running flawlessly for weeks.
AI wrote all the code. I did none of it. It works. Sorry you insist that it couldn't possibly, but you're kind of naive for believing that all the companies doing this have 100% failure rates and will continue
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Interesting, did you try any others, such as ChatGPT?
Long way to go (Score:2)
AI still has a long way to go before it is a reliable source of solutions, especially in the business world. Just the other day one of our developers was having drive space issues on his Linux box. Our management has been pushing AI hard, so he consulted with Gemini on how he could free up space on his machine. The AI recommended he use:
rm -rf /
The AI was happy to recommend this as a valid solution to the disk space problems. Lucky this dev has a shred of common sense and decided not to go through with
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> The AI recommended he use:
> rm -rf /
Looks like that AI has been scraping BOFH stories.
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I don't know why you're complaining, it looks pretty effective to me
Seen ads for PhD's ... (Score:2)
.. says right there, you'll be training AI.. paying $30/hour.
Sad.
Good. Take their money. (Score:2)
The AI companies will be gone by the end of the year.
How much more does ai need? (Score:2)
Hasn't ai already scooped up the entire internet, every book ever written, read through the transcripts of billions of videos, listened to billions of audio tracks? I'm sure amazon's ai has been listening to people over Alexa for years constantly. How much more data does it need before it gets good?
Well, for myself, these days when I write code on the internet when I know the ai is probably going to read it I intentionally write very bad code. Just for fun really, I know I'm not going to change anything.
Retirement gig (Score:2)
Great Boomer retirement part time gig that use your experiences that no non AI company values. Lots of free time, no job to lose, and extra cash to speed.
Actual intellectual property theft (Score:2)
You'll steal all your knowledge and experience and put it into the model. Then, they'll let you go. They've already extracted everything out of you. Why on earth would they keep paying you?
this is not a bubble (Score:2)
"Mercor's 22-year-old CEO" .. [1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]
"Mercor is an American artificial intelligence hiring startup that provides experts to train AI models and chatbots."
"Mercor pays out over $1.5 million daily to professionals it hires"
that's a lot of money going out. How much is coming in?
That is bonkers. This whole thing is bonkers.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/10/30/mercor-youngest-self-made-billionaires/
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Repeat it until it's true: thisis not a bubble!
Thirty Years of Progress (Score:2)
A colleague built an expert system using a Prolog toolkit back in the early 1990s to be used by US Navy medical corpsmen (not doctors) stationed on submarines to assess whether patients with head injuries were gravely enough injured that they should be airlifted (via helicopter) to shore for help. He developed this system based on many hours of discussions with experts in head trauma (who were paid for their time) and the finished system was accepted by the Navy.
Since it was my friend's IP, he decided t
Seriously? (Score:2)
> ... rates ranging from $20 to $185 per hour for contract work ...
How bad is the American economy when twenty bucks an hour is an attractive offer to train not only your replacement, but the replacement of everybody else in the country who holds the same job? Hell, people are selling themselves out - along with lots of others - for a rate that's only $3.50 an hour above California's minimum wage!
Can that AI pass the BAR or MCAT? (Score:2)
Can that AI pass the BAR or MCAT?
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Probably..
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Not according to Kim Kardashian.
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> Not according to Kim Kardashian.
Can Kim Kardashian pass a bar? :-)
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Only if she's driving
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It doesn't matter if they can pass the test. the real question is if an agent can get licensed as a professional.
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It will be weird if the only white collar jobs in a decade are those protected by needing a warm body to be legally liable or in the shadow of regulations that seem increasingly fragile.