Inside the risk-reward loop of training your own replacement

Last year, fresh out of active newsroom duties and between jobs, I was applying to roles on LinkedIn. Scrolling through the listings, I noticed a particular kind of post that kept recurring. In the middle of a difficult job market, and at a time when most companies were not only cutting costs but also calling employees back to the office, these offered fully remote work for as much as $150 an hour.

One such platform, Mercor, advertises an average rate of $225 an hour, more than 264,000 roles created and over $3 million in daily payouts. It is looking for experts in medicine, law, intellectual property, clinical research, management and strategy, engineering and development operations, among others. The list goes on. The job? Training AI.

People are now being paid to teach artificial intelligence to do their own work, eventually as well as they do it themselves. It is the fastest-growing category of work of its kind, and everyone wants a part of it.