Leaders like JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon argue that EQ and critical thinking are the only skills that will survive the automation wave. Microsoft Satya Nadella would agree, calling emotional intelligence a required workplace skill. These statements are meant to give workers reassurance that AI won’t completely replace people, highlighting an irreplaceable human trait that the technology supposedly cannot acquire. The stakes are high, with some AI thought leaders such as Dario Amodei warning that half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear, and soon, amid the AI wave.
But a Silicon Valley startup is challenging the assumption that human judgment is off limits to AI.
Mercor, a San Francisco-based AI firm, is hiring people from a vast list of professional career backgrounds to improve its AI, training the model to adopt core skills in a more human-like manner. In other words, they are building a business to prove executives like Jamie Dimon and Satya Nadella wrong—and to hasten the replacement of people with AI in the workforce, closing the last mile of human employment.
The company’s CEO Brendan Foody and co-founders Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha were recently minted the youngest self-made billionaires after the company was valued at $10 billion last November. That funding has given the 22-year-olds the resources needed to build out their ambitious AI venture.
