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AI labs are paying skilled professionals hundreds of dollars per hour to train their models in specialized fields. Companies like Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI and Turing recruit bankers, lawyers, engineers and doctors to improve the accuracy of AI systems in professional settings. Mercor advertises roles for medical secretaries, movie directors and private detectives at rates ranging from $20 to $185 per hour for contract work and up to $200,000 for full-time positions. Surge AI offers as much as $1,000 per hour for expertise from startup CEOs and venture capital partners. Mercor pays out over $1.5 million daily to professionals it hires for clients including OpenAI and Anthropic. Some contractors are former employees of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Others moonlight in this work while keeping their regular jobs. Brendan Foody, Mercor's 22-year-old CEO, acknowledged at a conference last week that trade secrets could potentially be compromised given the volume of work submitted. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on this week's earnings call that some AI training gigs on its platform require PhDs.

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Government agencies would also have to report losses due to automation.

ai-pocalypse A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn't come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we've seen since 2003. …

American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues. Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals. Strikes were frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the 1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the United States." The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in upgrades and research. Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in 1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem, Pa., is now a casino.

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Rockstar says it fired staff for leaks, but the IWGB accuses the GTA maker of union-busting

Rockstar Games denies claims that it fired several employees over their union activity, insisting that it sacked the team members for leaking confidential information.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is asking Automatic.CSS -- a company that provides a CSS framework for WordPress page builders -- to change its name amid public spats between Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and Automatic.CSS creator Kevin Geary. Automattic has two T's as a nod to Matt. "As you know, our client owns and operates a wide range of software brands and services, including the very popular web building and hosting platform WordPress.com," Jim Davis, an intellectual property attorney representing Automattic, wrote in a letter dated Oct. 30. "Automattic is also well-known for its longtime and extensive contributions to the WordPress system. Our client owns many trademark registrations for its Automattic mark covering those types of services and software," Davis continued. "As we hope you can appreciate, our client is concerned about your use of a nearly identical name and trademark to provide closely related WordPress services. Automattic and Automatic differ by only one letter, are phonetically identical, and are marketed to many of the same people. This all enhances the potential for consumer confusion and dilution of our client's Automattic mark."

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Counterfeiter failed to conjure a credible claim, appeals court rules

A convicted identity thief has lost his appeal against Uncle Sam after claiming federal agents destroyed a seized hard drive containing cryptocurrency worth more than $345 million.…

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said late Wednesday that the AI startup is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments, clarifying previous comments she made on stage during the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event. From a report: At the event, Friar said OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee" that could help the company finance its investments in cutting-edge chips. But in a LinkedIn post late Wednesday, Friar softened her stance. "I used the word 'backstop' and it muddied the point," Friar wrote. "As the full clip of my answer shows, I was making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part." OpenAI has inked more than $1.4 trillion of infrastructure deals in recent months to try and build out the data centers it says are needed to meet soaring demand. The agreements have raised questions around how the company can afford to make such massive commitments.

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Amazon's spat with Perplexity shows that technology is not the only blocker for the agentic era

Opinion The agentic era remains a fantasy world. Software agents, the notional next frontier for generative AI services, cannot escape the gravity of their contradictions, legal ambiguities, and competitive pressures. Not everyone, especially not competing businesses, wants a bot representing the customer.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: US software company SAS Institute has withdrawn from mainland China and dismissed its local staff, according to a Beijing-based employee affected by the move, as the analytics specialist ended more than two decades of operations amid intense domestic competition and geopolitical tensions. The company on Thursday announced the lay-offs via an email and hosted a short video call, in which executives thanked local employees for their contribution and cited "organisational optimisation" for the exit, according to the employee. "SAS is ceasing direct business operations in China," an SAS spokeswoman said on Friday in response to the Post's inquiry. "This decision reflects a broader shift in how we operate globally, optimising our footprint and ensuring long-term sustainability." The company would continue having a presence on the mainland via third-party partners, according to the spokeswoman.

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Sustainable vision? Who knows

Lenovo says that traditional datacenters are not fit for purpose, and must evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA. This is based on research, but the PC and server biz has come up with some wacky possible designs, including one that is almost literally in the clouds.…

It's not a bug, it's a feeling

Vibe coding has broken free of tech circles to claim Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year 2025 — a choice that may prompt developers to ask: what could possibly go wrong?…

The government shutdown-spurred airport chaos is about to get a whole lot worse. From a report: The Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday it will reduce flight volumes by 10 percent across 40 major airports in response, a move that could threaten 3,000 to 4,500 flights daily. The cuts will affect "high volume" markets, including in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City and Los Angeles, according to CBS. The FAA has not formally announced which airports will have their capacity cut. "I'm not aware in my 35-year history in the aviation market where we've had a situation where we're taking these kinds of measures," FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said at a news conference, according to the AP. The government shutdown, which is now the longest in US history, has already been causing thousands of delays each day, as well as long waits at airport security. Some major airports have even been forced to operate without air traffic control for hours at a time.

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