Company
Handshake supplies expert-sourced human training data for AI models, having pivoted from its original college recruiting and job-search platform.
Dumb.co required handwritten cover letters for its intern roles and got them from about 70% of nearly 900 Handshake applicants. The rule came days after the listings opened, so the figure cannot show how many applicants the step turned away.
Reality
The $350m Series E values Snorkel AI at $3.5b, roughly nine times the annualized revenue it reports. What a customer buys now is a written evaluation rubric, a graded dataset and a sandbox to train in.
Reality
Falling infrastructure work halved her income, so she logs into TalentsAI after hours and documents her own reasoning for a model that may one day do the job. Tasks pay 100 to 500 yuan, when they pass review.
Reality
Lovable raised $400M at a $13.3bn valuation on the promise that whoever owns a problem can build the software for it. That leaves boards deciding who owns those apps once the builders move on.
Reality
Hollywood creatives are paid $12 to $200 an hour to author the evaluation tasks that grade AI models. That price reflects their collapsed job market, not the value of what they sell.
Reality
The labeling startup went from $100M to $500M gross run rate, per TechCrunch. The take-rate arithmetic in that same disclosure does not reconcile, which deserves more attention than the growth curve.
Reality