Podcast Club ONLINE: Training & Optimizing AI Models - Brendan Foody, Mercor CEO

This week's podcast is Conversations with Tyler, with host Tyler Cowan and guest Brendan Foody, a 22-year-old college dropout who is the world's youngest self-made billionaire and youngest unicorn founder on record. Foody is the co-founder and CEO of Mercor, an AI company that hires and utilizes experts to train and improve the leading AI models and chatbots. Mercor is one of the fastest-growing startups ever, and its customers include Open AI and Anthropic.

In this podcast, Foody discusses how his company, Mercor, uses the expertise of people who excel in their field, whether in poetry, engineering, the law, medicine, banking, etc., to build meaningful AI models and optimize them. He describes why his company focuses on creating rubrics that grade output by usefulness to users rather than on aggregating academic/intellectual data. In addition, Foody talks about how the rubrics deal with the concept of taste or aesthetics, especially when outputs involve artistic or literary subject matter which typically change with culture over time. He further shares his thoughts on the value of human experts as AI improves, where he thinks job opportunities will arise, the future of education, the mistakes that interviewers make in hiring for jobs, nepotism, his middle school donut empire, and much more. It's impossible to walk away from this podcast without being extremely impressed by the intelligence and articulateness of the very young guest.

PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast below before attending the meeting to optimize discussion.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/brendan-foody/ (includes transcript)

or

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-with-tyler/id983795625?i=1000744127576

(1 hr, 1 min.)

What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times during the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm

Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.