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AI Labs Buy Your Work Data for Billions
6 Nov
Summary
- AI companies are paying millions for companies' old work records.
- Data acquisition startups are booming, seeking vast amounts of professional data.
- Concerns arise over privacy and the automation of human jobs through data.
A growing industry is quietly acquiring the digital workflows of companies, with AI labs reportedly paying substantial sums for historical data. Companies are offering between $350,000 and $1.8 million, and sometimes more, for access to documents, emails, and messages to train artificial intelligence models. Startups like Handshake and Mercor are leading this data acquisition boom, viewing it as a modern gold rush.
Mercor, founded in 2023, claims to partner with major AI labs, with its CEO highlighting the immense demand for data. While companies in this space assure that personal identifying information (PII) is scrubbed, concerns about privacy remain, particularly with unstructured data like emails and messages. The flight attendants' union has raised objections to the sale of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' digital assets, citing the potential for private information to be exposed.
A significant ethical concern is that this process enlists workers to contribute to AI development, potentially leading to the automation of their own jobs. The value of this data, generated by human work, is being commodified to train models that could replace human workers. The trend suggests that selling workflow data may become a common revenue stream for corporations.
