The $10 Billion “Echo”: Why Paying Experts to Train AI Might Be a Bridge to Nowhere

There’s a new giant in Silicon Valley called Mercor. Valued at a staggering $10 billion (a massive jump from its $2 billion valuation just months ago), their business model is simple: they pay doctors, lawyers, and engineers to sit down and teach AI how to do their jobs. By early 2026, the company is reportedly paying out over $1.5 million daily to a network of 30,000+ experts.

On the surface, it might look like a savvy way for tech companies to hire “elite contractors” rather than just scraping the internet. But if you dig deeper, or even just look at the chatter on Reddit or the reality of professional life, it looks less like a revolution and more like a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a human expert valuable.

When the “Interview” is the Product

If you head over to boards like r/jobhunting or r/mercor_ai, you’ll see a strange pattern. Thousands of people are applying, but many describe their experience as a “ghost” interview process. They sit for a high-tech AI video interview, sharing their specialized knowledge and professional “secrets,” only to never hear back.

This has led to a growing theory: The interview isn’t a hiring process – it’s the data collection. When you spend 30 minutes explaining a complex legal nuance to a bot, you aren’t just applying for a job; you’re providing the high-level training data they need. It’s a bit like auditioning for a play, only to find out the director just wanted to record your voice so they could replace you with a digital version. Technically, they have a privacy disclaimer buried in the fine print saying they use this to “improve internal models,” but let’s be real: most people think they’re interviewing for a job, not donating their brain to a $10 billion science project.

Reddit Discussions

The Crowd Speak: “This Role Doesn’t Exist”

The Theory: “Their job platform is a fugazi. Their real business is recording an ‘interview’ under the pretense of building a profile for you… they’re essentially just mining and selling interview data sets.” – r/ArtificialInteligence

The “Free Work” Trap: “I think at Mercor, the interview is the one thing they want people to do. Collecting free training data. Such a smart move.” – r/mercor_ai

The Disappearing Job: “This is a one-way interview; it gave no information about the role because it doesn’t exist.” – r/recruitinghell

The Artificial in Artificial Intelligence

The “Echo Chamber” in Action: “The AI has no idea about the role other than your resume and the description. It used language from the description to ask me questions… It’s basically scripted resume-to-job-description matching.” – r/recruitinghell

The “Expert” Glitch: “Zara [the AI] had me questioning my expertise cause I was like ‘yeaaa I don’t do this in my line of work’… it was very persistent asking architecture questions about my own development work for a completely unrelated application.” – r/mercor_ai

Why It Feels a Bit “Off”

The Privacy Fear: “I felt very odd that my image and answers were going to live forever and could even be used to make someone else pretend to be me… it feels like they are exploiting our desperation.” –r/technicalwriting

The “Disposable” Feeling: “The onboarding is complex, long-winded, full of technical screw-ups… and the project manager treats you like a disposable human.” – r/mercor_ai

The “Glue in the Pizza” Problem

This brings up a huge red flag: AI doesn’t actually “know” anything; it just predicts the next word. Remember when Google’s AI told people to put Elmer’s glue in their pizza sauce to keep the cheese from sliding off? It wasn’t being malicious; it had simply read an old, sarcastic Reddit post and took it as truth.

The same thing can happen here. Even curated expert training can amplify subtle errors if incentives reward speed over depth. Or maybe they’re not just tired or rushed, but feeling just a little cheeky, and the AI will swallow those errors whole. They’re building a $10 billion tower on a foundation that might be full of digital glue.

Unlike a parrot – which is actually quite smart and can communicate real needs – an AI is just an echo chamber. If the input is wrong, the “expert” AI is just a very confident liar.

Would You Trust a “Bot” with Your Life?

The tech world is betting billions that we can “distill” a doctor’s brain into an algorithm. But there’s a reason most of us don’t want a robot lawyer or an AI surgeon.

• The “Vibe” Check: A great lawyer doesn’t just know the law; they know how to read a room and navigate the “gray areas” that aren’t in any textbook.
• The Responsibility Factor: If a human doctor makes a mistake, there is a shared human tragedy. If an AI “hallucinates” a diagnosis, it’s just a glitch. We want a person across the desk because we need someone who understands the weight of the decision.

We go to experts for their judgment, not just their information. Mercor is trying to buy the information, but judgment is something that only comes from living a life. Why stop at AI lawyers? If we reduce expertise to data, why stop at law or medicine? Why not outsource every human domain? If we don’t value the human connection, the whole thing falls apart.

Eating the Seed Corn

If we use today’s masters to automate all the “junior” work, we’re essentially destroying the classroom for tomorrow’s masters. Most experts have learned their craft by doing the “boring” entry-level tasks. If those tasks are all handed off to an “Expert-Bot,” how does a young student ever gain the experience needed to become the veteran of the future? We might be building a very smart machine for today by sacrificing the experts of tomorrow.

Why would you train someone to take over your job? Because you believe in the project? Because you think that’s a world you want to live in, where robots replace the human touch in everyday tasks? Because you need a job? Because you think after this you and other experts can spend time on the “real important” stuff? Based on the Reddit discussions, it appears the answer is “C”.

The Bottom Line

Mercor is an experiment in scale, but it misses the soul of expertise. It treats human wisdom like a commodity that can be bought, sold, and digitized. You can pay a pianist to explain how they play a concerto, but that doesn’t mean the computer can feel the music.

It’s a giant, expensive bridge to nowhere. They’re paying people to help build a world where they aren’t needed anymore. It’s marketed as replacement, not augmentation – as automation of judgment, not empowerment of it. That’s not progress. That’s extraction.

Imagine if Aretha Franklin lived in this world – it gives new meaning to the line “You make me feel like a natural woman”.

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The Human Manifesto

1. Expertise is Lived: You can’t download 20 years of “gut feeling.”
2. Accountability Matters: A machine has no skin in the game.
3. No More “Ghost” Harvesting: Interviews should be for jobs, not for adding to the data collection.
4. Keep it Human: We want tools that help us work, not replacements that make us obsolete in jobs that require feeling and critical thinking.

AI can be useful in augmentation scenarios – but replacing lived expertise is a different claim.

Have you been ghosted by an AI interview?

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