Mercor AI Capabilities Fund Grants
Remote • San Francisco • Temporary
Posted 13h ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
Temporary
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Mercor is a leading AI data company dedicated to organizing human intelligence to power the AI economy. We build the infrastructure that connects human expertise with frontier AI models, enabling millions of domain experts to train advanced AI systems. Our mission is to create a new category of work where expertise drives AI advancement, fostering an ambitious and committed team environment. We are offering $5 million in grants to fund AI capabilities research, focusing on critical areas like real-world evaluations, high-fidelity environments, long-horizon tasks, agentic capabilities, reasoning, post-training methods, and robust evaluation methodologies.
Responsibilities
- Conduct research on AI capabilities, focusing on real-world evaluations and performance translation from benchmarks to production.
- Develop high-fidelity, interactive environments to simulate complex real-world work scenarios for AI testing.
- Investigate and improve AI models' ability to plan, execute, and adapt across extended workflows (long-horizon tasks).
- Advance agentic capabilities, including tool use, coordination, memory, and autonomous execution.
- Enhance AI reasoning and problem-solving for complex, ambiguous, or underspecified tasks.
- Develop improved data, rewards, and training methods for post-training AI models.
- Create more robust measures for evaluating AI capability, reliability, and real-world utility.
- Publish research findings, open datasets, public methodologies, or tools for the AI field.
Requirements
- Academic groups, independent researchers, and non-profit organizations are eligible to apply.
- Applicants must have a specific, well-scoped research question.
- Experience with agentic evaluation is a plus.
- Experience with RL environments is a plus.
- Experience with post-training methods is a plus.
Benefits
- Funding for autonomous frontier-work.
- Access to Mercor's expert network for human grading and annotation.
- Access to Mercor's internal evaluation infrastructure.
- Introductions to Mercor's network of researchers across frontier labs and academia.
- Stipends for event and conference attendance.