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Comment by mcphage

8 hours ago

Where do they get the bespoke training data from? And how much? I don’t really know anything about this.

> And how much?

Mercor, one of the larger vendors for contracting with experts to create bespoke data, says on their webpage they're paying $3M/day to their contractors for data.

So well into the billions of dollars a year for bespoke training data.

That's also ignoring the RLVR data labs can get from software - they can use the vibe coding sessions as training data as well without paying more.

They are just one of many.

Companies like Mercor sell data from human experts

  • Offhand, do you know what format that data is in? Is it a question and then a human answering that question? Mostly just curious at to what the training data consists of.

    • The most advanced training data is in the form of rubrics as rewards.

      A human asks a question, then writes rubrics to judge the LLMs response, so rather than evaluating a specific response, those rubrics can live on as the LLM evolves and gives different answers. There are more complex variants as well, but that's the basic principle.

      https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17746

meta has reallocated a significant protion of their staff to genrating this

  • Meta also reportedly took a 49% nonvoting stake in Scale AI in June 2025 for about $14.3–$14.8 billion.