ABOUT MERCOR
Mercor’s mission is to organize human intelligence for the AI economy. We build the infrastructure that enables frontier AI labs and enterprises to train, evaluate, and improve AI on real-world professional work. More than five million experts have joined our network, and we pay out over $5 million daily for their knowledge and expertise.
We built our training and evaluation infrastructure alongside the world’s leading AI labs. Now, we’re bringing those capabilities to enterprises across industries, enabling them to train, evaluate, and improve AI using their own expertise and standards. Our APEX benchmarks measure how AI performs on economically valuable work, while our enterprise evaluations and post-training capabilities turn those insights into measurable improvements across real-world workflows.
Our work sits at the intersection of frontier AI, human expertise, and real-world application. We’re solving problems few companies have encountered, with the opportunity to influence what the world’s most advanced AI systems become capable of doing. We’re looking for people who bring different perspectives, take ownership, exercise sound judgment, and hold themselves to an exceptionally high standard. You’ll have the opportunity to do consequential work alongside talented colleagues who challenge one another, collaborate openly, and share a commitment to excellence.
Mercor is profitable and recently raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation. We work in person five days a week in San Francisco, New York, and London.
MERCOR AI RESEARCH FUND GRANTS: ECONOMICS OF AI
One of the biggest challenges facing the industry today is determining whether frontier AI is capable enough to deliver value in real-world settings. A model can perform well on benchmarks and still struggle in production. That’s why investing in research, realistic evaluations, and robust verification is critical.
Mercor is seeking to fund AI research on the economic impacts of AI. This is separate from the Mercor Research Fellowship, which funds individual experts (apply HERE https://www.mercor.com/careers/a0a98be0-d856-4129-b500-c0a3e412ef01/), our $5m of safety funding awards (apply HERE https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mercor/1d59ce50-4207-4d95-b7fd-5a01e90b0897), and our funding of benchmarking research.
The grant supports:
- The time of experts from Mercor's platform
- Researcher hours
- API costs
- Stipends for event and conference attendance
BUDGET CATEGORIES
Applications are grouped into three budget tiers. Please state your tier clearly in your application and ensure your overall budget ask falls within it:
- Tier 1: under $50,000: Suited to focused, well-scoped projects such as pilot studies, evaluations, replications, or extensions of existing work. These applications undergo a streamlined review.
- Tier 2: under $200,000: Suited to substantial projects requiring dedicated personnel time, meaningful compute, or data collection. Reviewed with proportionally greater attention to the budget breakdown and implementation plan.
- Tier 3: under $500,000: Reserved for ambitious, multi-component research programs. These applications receive the highest level of scrutiny: reviewers will expect a detailed justification of each spend category, a clear account of team capacity to execute at this scale, and milestones against which progress can be assessed.
The level of review scrutiny scales with the size of the ask, so applicants should request the smallest budget that credibly supports the proposed work.
RESEARCH AGENDA
We are interested in submissions in the following area:
1. Measuring AI’s impact on labor
- How should we measure AI’s effect on real economic and labor outcomes — and what methodologies are up to the task?
- To what extent do benchmark scores map onto real economic outcomes?
- What is the right methodology for measuring AI’s impact on labor outcomes (employment, wages, task composition)?
- How does occupational exposure to AI evolve…