While companies may aim for a future where generative AI can replace the work of a junior employee, the technology is in its “shadowing” era, sitting deskside and learning the ropes.
AI training, the process of refining a large language model’s responses to make it more accurate, requires real humans to evaluate how well the AI answers a prompt. When applied to wonky professions, like investment banking, where examples of real work aren’t easily found online, that human guidance is even greater.
That explains why AI training firms like Mercor and Scale AI’s subsidiary Outlier, and LLMs like Elon Musk’s xAI are offering high hourly rates to those with professional experience in finance, according to a Business Insider review of 18 recent job postings from eight different companies.
The highest publicly posted hourly rate is up to $150, the high end of a post by Labelbox-owned Alignerrr for someone with financial planning and wealth management experience, with merely $15 an hour at the low end.
xAI is offering to pay between $35 and $100 an hour for a range of AI Tutoring roles, from those for people with sell-side expertise like investment banking and trading or buy-side experience like private equity, venture capital, or hedge fund investing, to even more specialized requests like quant investing or portfolio management professionals.
One role at Micro1, with a very general title, “Finance Expert – AI Tutor,” appears to be a very specific search for someone who has been the CFO at a hedge fund. However, the job description does not include compensation details.
Who is training AI about finance?
Most of these roles are listed as remote and part-time, begging the question of whether employees of investment banks or other financial institutions are using these gigs as side hustles. Or maybe, they’re a banker who received a pink slip this year and is looking for extra cash. xAI is offering both remote and in-person work in Palo Alto, as well as both full-time and part-time roles.
Outlier offers flexible opportunities, a Scale AI spokesperson said in an email. “Many contributors work full-time in fields like finance,” they said, referencing one contractor who works full-time while doing voice-acting tasks in his free time.
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The other firms mentioned declined to comment further on their searches.
In a promotional video posted by Mercor on LinkedIn this week, a man identified only as Matt explains that he joined the platform to make ends meet as a first-year Wharton MBA student. He says that he used his finance background, as a former Bank of America investment banker and investor at private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice, to train Mercor’s model.
“I joined the platform hoping to make things work a little bit better for me in the short term,” Matt says in the video. “Instead, I’m helping build what’s next.”
Currently, Mercor is the only company offering entirely full-time jobs, with full-time postings for buy-side and sell-side AI tutors that pay between $90,000 and $200,000 and a posting for an investment banking expert that pays between $90,000 and $120,000.
While these payouts fare decently well compared to analyst-level salaries, they’re under par for associates, whose base salaries in 2024 ranged from $170,000 to $230,000, according to investment banking salary data provided to Business Insider. One investment banking expert role says Mercor is looking for workers with three or more years of experience in investment banking, “ideally” at a top-tier bank like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, or Morgan Stanley. The roles could appeal to those looking for a change from Wall Street’s grueling hours.
Are you a financial worker who has done any AI training work? We would love to hear from you via encrypted messaging app Signal at @alexnicoll.01 using a non-work phone, email at [email protected] or [email protected].
