Tech In Action / Proof of Technology. Evidence over hype. See what already pays today. AI • Robotics • Automation • Business
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About $1.2 billion just bought 30 Navy ships with nobody on board.
The US Navy ordered 30 crewless ships from three builders: Saronic, HII and Galliano Marine Services. Call it $40 million a ship on average, and these are production orders.
Somebody's getting paid, and the list is odd. HII builds America's aircraft carriers. Saronic is a Texas startup that says it took its Marauder from design to water in under a year.
The Navy isn't buying code here. It buys a hull with the autonomy already inside, priced per ship, and pays for production rather than prototypes. If you build autonomy software, that's how the biggest buyer on the water wants to pay, so price per finished boat or partner with somebody who welds.
Software margins don't survive a steel bill. Saronic's contract is firm fixed price, meaning it eats any cost overrun, so Saronic just agreed to learn that on its own dime.
Mark Zuckerberg lost his youngest self-made billionaire record to three college dropouts at Mercor. Their AI startup now says it pays experts who train AI about $5 million a day.
Brendan Foody, the co-CEO, said it in an interview. Asked to confirm $5 million a day, he answers "now well over that." Two years ago, he says, Mercor paid out about $1 million in a whole year.
Doctors and lawyers rate a model's answers, and AI labs buy the ratings, data as raw material for the next model. Mercor pays the expert by the hour and bills the lab for the finished data.
Bloomberg reported in October that Mercor's average is about $110 an hour. Recruiter postings in this market go up to $400 an hour for some lawyers.
My math, from his number: $5 million a day at $110 an hour is roughly 45,000 expert hours, every day. Call it 5,700 full-time jobs at eight hours each. Somebody's getting paid.
On November 10 Mercor raised $750 million at a $20 billion valuation, a bet that companies, not just labs, will keep paying people to grade AI.
If you bill hours in a licensed field, AI labs are already a buyer for your judgment, and Mercor's experts average about $110 an hour. That price holds until a model can check its own homework in your field.
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