ai-training-as-infrastructure

2 items

WIRED 2026-05-10-2

I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI

Mercor's 300 employees plus tens of thousands of contractors is structurally identical to Medvi's 2 employees plus outsourced clinical labor — same shape, different industry. The frontier labs' "human alignment" premium is a labor-supply-chain bet, and procurement DD that asks about training-data provenance but not evaluation-labor provenance is asking 2024's question. The atomization Fowler describes is the durable feature: profession unbundled into rate-this, classify-that, evaluate-that, with the person erased and the signal extracted.

Financial Times 2026-04-23-2

High earners race ahead on AI as workplace divide widens

The FT/Focaldata tracker landed with the expected inequality headline, but the operational finding is buried: corporate training is the single biggest driver of AI adoption, and a single Google session tripled daily usage among UK women over 55. Within lawyers, accountants, and developers, senior and junior adoption rates are nearly identical, which means seniors are directing AI to do what juniors used to do. The career pyramid erosion mechanism is now empirical, not speculative, and every firm that depends on apprenticeship-to-expertise faces a succession crisis that compounds with each training cycle missed.