Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

About this episode

Brendan Foody discusses the intersection of AI, knowledge work, and entrepreneurship as the youngest guest on Conversations with Tyler.

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone's cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor's next steps, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations…

People in this episode

Host: Tyler

Guest: Brendan Foody

Topics covered

• AI
• knowledge work
• startups
• entrepreneurship
• education
• future of work

Keywords

• AI models
• Mercor
• knowledge workers
• entrepreneurship
• dyslexia
• Thiel Fellowship
• rubrics
• evaluation frameworks

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mercor, Conversations with Tyler, Mercatus Center

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