# Chinese tech giants are hiring skilled professionals as specialized AI trainers to build high-quality datasets, mirroring efforts by US platforms like Mercor (Viola Zhou/Rest of World)

> As the easy gains from scraping the open web dry up, the race for better AI is quietly becoming a race for better human labor. Rest of World reports that Chinese tech giants are hiring skilled professionals to work as specialized AI trainers, producing the high-quality, expert-labeled data that models need to improve on hard tasks. The approach mirrors what US platforms like Mercor have been doing to connect domain experts with labs hungry for their knowledge. It is a striking inversion of the fear that AI will simply replace white-collar workers. For now, doctors, lawyers, and other specialists are being paid precisely because their expertise is what the models still lack. Their judgment gets encoded into training sets that will, eventually, narrow that gap. The trend also underscores how much frontier progress now depends on painstaking data work rather than raw compute alone. Whoever assembles the best expert datasets may gain an edge that money and chips cannot easily replicate. That both the US and China are converging on the same strategy suggests this human-in-the-loop bottleneck is now central to the whole enterprise.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: Techmeme · Published Thursday, September 10, 2026_

## Wortins' read

As the easy gains from scraping the open web dry up, the race for better AI is quietly becoming a race for better human labor. Rest of World reports that Chinese tech giants are hiring skilled professionals to work as specialized AI trainers, producing the high-quality, expert-labeled data that models need to improve on hard tasks. The approach mirrors what US platforms like Mercor have been doing to connect domain experts with labs hungry for their knowledge. It is a striking inversion of the fear that AI will simply replace white-collar workers. For now, doctors, lawyers, and other specialists are being paid precisely because their expertise is what the models still lack. Their judgment gets encoded into training sets that will, eventually, narrow that gap. The trend also underscores how much frontier progress now depends on painstaking data work rather than raw compute alone. Whoever assembles the best expert datasets may gain an edge that money and chips cannot easily replicate. That both the US and China are converging on the same strategy suggests this human-in-the-loop bottleneck is now central to the whole enterprise.

## Source

[Read the full story at Techmeme](https://www.techmeme.com/260910/p6#a260910p6)

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