Mercor, debuting on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, built an AI recruiter to interview job candidates. Along the way, it discovered a more immediate cash cow: finding humans to train AI models. Sitting in a conference room at Mercor’s office in San Francisco’s South of Market district, CEO Brendan Foody recalls the day in June that changed everything. Meta had announced it was buying almost half of data labeling giant Scale AI for $14 billion and poaching its star CEO Alexandr Wang. Mercor, a smaller...