Incredible Work
Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, is announcing TaskNet — a task-level taxonomy for measuring what AI can actually do across occupations, built with Stanford, O*NET and NBER. The idea is timely: O*NET is the de facto standard for describing jobs, and rebuilding it around AI capabilities could give economists and labs a shared reference for job-relevant evals, which chatbot leaderboards badly lack.… more
The catch is incentives — Mercor sells AI training data and expert matching, so a benchmark framing AI as ready to absorb whole job families doubles as good marketing. The real test is adoption by independent researchers outside Mercor's orbit. If that happens, this is quiet but meaningful labor-market infrastructure; if not, it's a well-branded eval.
It was incredible to work with Stanford, the O*NET Resource Center, and the National Bureau of Economic Research to build TaskNet.
As AI radically changes jobs in the economy, we need a better taxonomy to evaluate what it can do.
Source:
X — Brendan Foody
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