AI labs are paying experts up to $400/hour to train models
Bloomberg Law reports AI labs are hiring working professionals through marketplaces like Mercor, Handshake AI and Prolific to grade model output, write reference answers and check reasoning. Advertised rates reach $400/hour for a civil-rights lawyer, $170 for a solid-state physicist and $120 for software engineers; Mercor says it averages about $110/hour across 30,000 active contractors. It is real, press-verified income, but the irony is sharp: the experts are training the models that may replace them.