Keep pulling the thread on Brendan Foody.
Merkur has surpassed a $100 million revenue run rate.
Brendan Foody predicts that AI-driven job displacement will happen very quickly, leading to significant pain and creating a large political problem.
Brendan Foody predicts that AI may soon become more effective as a manager than as an independent contributor.
Brendan Foody is optimistic about Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) because it is profoundly data-efficient, requiring only hundreds to thousands of examples, which makes it viable for application-layer companies to customize models.
Brendan Foody predicts that the future global labor market will be a hybrid marketplace where both humans and AI agents compete for jobs.
Brendan Foody believes current base models possess sufficient reasoning capabilities for agentic work, and the primary bottleneck is learning tool use and company-specific knowledge via a small number of evaluations.
Brendan Foody argues that current AI model evaluations are too focused on academic, zero-shot tasks and should instead focus on evaluating performance on complex, economically valuable work.
Since its founding in 2023, Merkur has raised $100 million in funding.
Merkur's AI models are already outperforming human hiring managers in assessing talent on most of its evaluations.
Brendan Foody believes the creation of effective evaluations for AI agents is the largest remaining barrier to automating most knowledge work.
Brendan Foody states that large-scale, AI-driven job displacement is already occurring in customer support and recruiting, and he expects it to happen imminently in other sectors.
Brendan Foody predicts that creating evaluations ('evals') for AI models could become the most common knowledge work job in the world.