This doctor is training AI to do her job. And it’s a booming business

Source Domain: www.cnn.com

Dr. Alice Chiao used to teach emergency medicine to students at Stanford University’s medical school. Now, she’s teaching artificial intelligence-powered chatbots to think, diagnose and prescribe like her.

Chiao is part of a booming new economy of professional experts in their fields who are training AI through a process called reinforcement learning, essentially grading AI’s responses and teaching models to improve through trial and error. It’s a rapidly growing service industry for AI frontier labs, estimated to be worth at least $17 billion, according to Pitchbook Senior AI Analyst, Dimitri Zabelin.

Chiao is one of tens of thousands of experts working with Mercor, one of the companies that help manage reinforcement learning for major AI companies. Mercor has contracts with experts in subjects ranging from medicine, law and finance to comedy, sports and even wine. Experts can earn up to hundreds of dollars per hour teaching AI to do their own jobs.

“AI is going to be the new Doctor Google, the new WebMD that people will go to, to seek out medical information. I knew that I needed to be a part of that to make sure that the information is accurate, that it’s safe, and that it makes sense to the person using it,” Chiao told CNN.

AI models are trained on massive amounts of data. But that training doesn’t do much good without that reinforcement learning. Companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic use what Mercor’s CEO Brendan Foody described as “large armies of people” to do just that.

Uncertainty over how AI will reshape various industries hit a fever pitch over the last two weeks. Software stocks plunged in early February following the release of a new tool from Anthropic that tailors its model for work in specific industries like legal and…

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