No Priors• Apr 10, 2025• 41mInterview

No Priors Ep. 110 | With Mercor CEO and Co-Founder Brendan Foody

From No Priors

Brendan Foody•CEO and Co-Founder, Mercor

Executive Summary

Merkur, an AI-powered recruiting platform, has achieved a $100M revenue run rate and $100M in funding since its 2023 founding by using AI to predict job performance, initially for hiring AI model trainers.
The core thesis is that AI models are already superhuman at evaluating talent for text-based knowledge work, and it will soon be considered irrational for companies not to use AI recommendations in hiring.
The future of knowledge work will shift from performing tasks to creating evaluations ('evals') that teach AI agents what 'good' looks like, potentially becoming the most common job in the economy.
The global labor market is evolving into a hybrid marketplace of humans and AI agents, with AI-driven job displacement accelerating, particularly in fields like customer support and recruiting.

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Concerns Raised

The rapid pace of AI-driven job displacement will cause significant societal pain.
AI models are still developing the ability to evaluate crucial multimodal signals like passion and persuasiveness.
The creation of effective, real-world evaluations for AI agents remains the largest barrier to widespread automation of knowledge work.

Opportunities Identified

AI can create a more efficient and meritocratic global labor market by identifying top talent regardless of location or background.
Creating 'evals' for AI models is poised to become a massive new category of knowledge work.
Merkur's data flywheel, which correlates pre-hire data with on-the-job performance, creates a powerful and defensible competitive advantage.

Key Themes

AI-Powered Talent Evaluation

AI models are becoming superhuman at assessing job candidates, particularly for roles where performance can be measured through text-based interactions and online data. This automates and improves hiring by identifying top performers more effectively and efficiently than human managers.

This signals a fundamental disruption in HR and recruiting, promising more meritocratic and efficient labor markets but also challenging traditional hiring practices and the role of human intuition.

The 'Eval' Economy

As AI agents become more capable, the most critical human task will shift from doing the work to creating robust evaluations ('evals') that teach AI what success looks like for a given task. This process of defining and measuring 'good' could become the most common form of knowledge work.

This offers a potential, albeit transitional, path for human labor in an increasingly automated world, highlighting a new category of jobs focused on AI training, oversight, and quality control.

The Future of Labor Markets

The global labor market is rapidly evolving into a hybrid system where humans and AI agents compete and collaborate for tasks. This transition will cause significant, rapid job displacement but also create new roles and opportunities centered around managing and training AI.

This provides a framework for understanding the large-scale economic and societal shifts AI will cause, moving beyond simple automation to a new human-machine labor paradigm that requires new skills and corporate structures.

The Bottleneck to Agentic AI

The primary barrier to creating more capable, agentic AI is not the core reasoning ability of base models, but the creation of effective, real-world evaluations. Current academic benchmarks are insufficient; the focus must shift to measuring performance on practical, multi-step tasks that mirror real jobs.

This reframes the AI development race, suggesting that progress depends less on scaling models and more on developing sophisticated methods to measure and guide their performance on complex, real-world problems.

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Topics

AI in HR Recruiting Technology Talent Evaluation Job Performance Prediction Future of Work Labor Markets AI Agents Model Evaluations (Evals)Reinforcement Learning Human Data AI Training Job Displacement Knowledge Work Data Flywheel Merkur

Processed Mar 31, 2026 yt-dlp + mlx-whisper + Gemini