AI training is booming, and LinkedIn wants a piece of the pie.
LinkedIn has confirmed to Business Insider that the career networking site is in the early stages of launching an “AI job marketplace” where you can train AI chatbots to excel in everything from coding to nursing to finance and earn up to $150 an hour.
A spokesperson for Microsoft-owned LinkedIn said AI training is currently one of the fastest-growing jobs in the U.S. and is conducting early tests.
An AI trainer is a human who helps the chatbot improve by evaluating its answers and testing its limits. This is a new type of gig work facilitated by the AI boom, leading to the creation of fast-growing AI training startups serving clients like Anthropic.
LinkedIn has over 12 public listings hiring AI trainers.
Someone with Excel and financial expertise can earn $100 an hour, and a nurse can earn a similar amount. The highest paying position is Senior Software Engineer AI Trainer, which can earn up to $150 per hour. Other roles include trainers of Germanic and Nordic linguists, who pay up to $100, and people who “red team” or test AI systems, who pay $40 to $50 an hour.
LinkedIn has also rolled out the ability to receive notifications whenever AI training opportunities appear.
The move puts LinkedIn in direct competition with many of the fastest-growing AI training startups that match talent with frontier AI labs like OpenAI to improve their models.
Melkor’s valuation has increased fivefold to $10 billion in less than a year. Another AI training startup, Surge AI, owns Data Annotation, a marketplace for human experts, and is valued at $24 billion, Forbes reported.
The field’s tremendous growth and vast number of contributors also contribute to serious cybersecurity issues.
For example, Scale AI left sensitive contractor and customer information widely exposed in hundreds of Google Docs last year and locked them down after Business Insider exposed the practice. Melkor recently suffered a serious data breach that compromised contractor data, leading to five class action lawsuits in one week.