NYTimes: “Mercor and a handful of similar start-ups are the primary middlemen in a supply chain of “human data” that may power the next generation of A.I. As OpenAI, Anthropic and other major ventures compete to become the industry’s dominant platform, the market for premium data that has been vetted by experts is exploding. No longer do the A.I. companies need armies of low-paid workers, often overseas, to do rote tasks like tag images of cars or transcribe audio. They need mathematicians to annotate proofs, lawyers to mark up briefs and professors to grade essays. That’s what Mercor and its rivals supply. To use the parlance of the industry, data labeling has moved up the “value chain,” and the start-ups that offer this service have become some of the fastest growing in Silicon Valley.”
FT: “The latest in the BBC’s extraordinary natural history legacy tackles this head on. It’s simply called Evolution. And by god, they’ve done it. It’s a bit like the history of science itself, where it took the fusion of natural history, chemistry, cell biology and maths to realise what had been there all along: life is a chemical reaction, contained in cells, written in DNA, under the auspices of natural selection, and the combination of these things explains how life is the way it is. Evolution should be compulsory viewing for everyone over the age of five.”
Vinod Khosla on option-value investing: “I like to say I do option-value investing. If the option expires, you lose one times your money. If it works, you make five times your money, 10 times your money, 100…and I hope OpenAI is 1,000x or more. Not everybody should be like me, but people who are more ambitious in what they want to get done, you have to take risks. If it’s an easy problem, somebody will have solved it.”
ICONIQ’s 2026 State of AI Report: The Builder’s Economy. SaaStr’s take.
FT: “Just under a third of the 1.5bn [Indian] population pursue some form of higher education but only 1 to 2 per cent of applicants find a place in the top tier of India’s more than 1,160 universities and 45,000 colleges.”
