Handshake's CEO says the AI training world is evolving from generalists to STEM experts getting paid over $125 an hour

Business Insider

22-07-2025

A kitchen-table side hustle is on the cusp of requiring an advanced degree.
The data annotation industry has paid hundreds of thousands of part-time contractors around the world to filter, rank, and train AI responses for the world's largest AI companies. Now, who does that contracting work is changing, according to one tech CEO.
Garrett Lord, the CEO of job search and AI training platform Handshake, said the data annotation industry is moving from requiring generalists to needing highly specialized math and science experts.
"Now these models have kind of sucked up the entirety of the entire corpus of the internet and every book and video," he said on an episode of the "Grit" podcast released on Monday. "They've gotten good enough where like generalists are no longer needed."
Lord said that frontier AI labs need experts in areas like accounting, law, and medicine, as well as in STEM domains like physics, math, and chemistry.
The CEO said that contractors are making an average of over $100 to $125 an hour on the platform, applying their domain expertise to AI training projects. Pay for generalists ranges between a couple of dollars to about $40 per hour based on task and location, generalist contractors on other platforms told Business Insider.
Lord's remarks come after big shake-ups at one of Handshake's competitors: Scale AI recently received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta.
Just hours after Meta announced its blockbuster deal, Google halted multiple projects with the company, BI reported last month. OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI have paused some Scale projects, too, Scale contractors working on them told BI.
Handshake and other data labeling platforms like Appen, Prolific, and Turing have welcomed the deal. Executives from these companies said they are seeing more interest from Big Tech clients.
"The labs don't want the other labs to figure out what data they're using to make their models better," Lord said in an interview with Time magazine published last month. He added that demand for Handshake's services "tripled overnight" in the wake of the Meta deal.
"If you're General Motors or Toyota, you don't want your competitors coming into your manufacturing plant and seeing how you run your processes," he told Time.
A Scale spokesperson told BI last month in a statement that "nothing has changed" about its customer data protection.
"Security and customer trust have always been core to our business, and we will continue to ensure the right protections are in place to help safeguard all of our work with customers," the statement said.