adarsh

Traditional coding benchmarks do not reflect how software is actually built and maintained. That's why we built a new benchmark, APEX-SWE, in partnership with @cognition. It measures whether AI models can perform complex, real-world software engineering work to ship systems that work and debug them when they don't. @OpenAI GPT 5.3 Codex (High) tops the leaderboard at 41.5% on Pass@1.

We've collaborated with @mercor_ai on APEX-SWE, a new benchmark that evaluates AI models on realistic software engineering tasks.

You can read more about APEX-SWE here: mercor.com/blog/introduci…

We have an open-source dev set on @huggingface: huggingface.co/datasets/merco… And, our eval harness on @GitHub: github.com/Mercor-Intelli…

Traditional coding benchmarks do not reflect how software is actually built and maintained. That's why we built a new benchmark, APEX-SWE, in partnership with @cognition. It measures whether AI models can perform complex, real-world software engineering work to ship systems that work and debug them when they don't. @OpenAI GPT 5.3 Codex (High) tops the leaderboard at 41.5% on Pass@1.

@bonatsos @generalcatalyst congrats niko! thank you for being our first believer, no doubt you’ll crush it at what’s next

After 15 wonderful years @generalcatalyst I am moving on to new adventures. The best days for GC are ahead! Super grateful to every single one of my teammates that I had the fortune to work with over the years. I learned a lot. Very thankful to our limited partners too for their long-term support. Equally importantly, it's been the privilege of a lifetime to work with so many inspiring tech startup founders from the very early days.

@appliedcompute congrats!

Generalists are useful, but it’s not enough to be smart. Advances come from specialists, whether human or machine. To have an edge, agents need specific expertise, within specific companies, built on models trained on specific data. We call this Specific Intelligence. It's what we're building at Applied Compute. We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports to your team. We work with sophisticated companies that have already captured early gains from general models, like @cognition, @DoorDash, and @mercor_ai. They’re pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don’t need to wait for the next public model release. Together, we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals. Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — @ypatil125 as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), @rhythmrg as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and @lindensli as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training. Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners. We are backed by $80M in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models. In short: 1. We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies. 2. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses. 3. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.

Read more here: wsj.com/tech/ai/the-ai…

A year ago, our entire company fit into one conference room. Now, we’ve moved offices twice to keep up with our growth. We’re a team of more than 300 people globally, across engineering, product, and operations. I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and even more energized about where we’re going. This raise wasn’t out of necessity. Mercor is profitable and operating from strength. The round was driven by inbound investor interest, and we closed it in 5 days. We’re hiring across nearly every function. Join us: mercor.com/careers

I first met Surya when I was 10 years old. We were the only elementary schoolers who wanted to compete in high school speech and debate tournaments together, so we very quickly became friends. Throughout middle school, Surya and I debated each other several times in a 1v1 debate format called Lincoln Douglas. I will never forgive him for eliminating me from the Middle School State Championship, but I guess that’s to be expected when you have to compete against somebody as persuasive as Surya.  In high school, Surya and I joined forces as debate partners, where we competed together in Policy Debate. I like to describe this as my first “startup,” since Surya and I had 50-50 equity in each other’s success and went through a series of emotional highs and lows at the major national debate tournaments. When high school passed, it was almost assumed that Surya and I would work together in some capacity. Fast forward two years, and Mercor was born.  Surya, Brendan, and I dropped out together, moved to New York (mistake), and then finally ended up in San Francisco. Shortly after, we discovered the human data market, and started building a product and operations team to solve what we believed was ultimately a talent assessment problem.  Believe it or not, Surya was the first Strategic Project Lead at Mercor. His very playbook ultimately became the groundwork for the SPL role itself. He individually recruited and mentored the earliest SPL joiners of the team. During his time at Mercor, Surya was the invisible hand that kept the company running. Before we had automated our payments system, Surya would manually generate a spreadsheet and issue every payment himself. Surya was our point person for all legal matters. Surya’s recruiting efforts have directly resulted in several dozen SPLs joining the team. Surya was in the weeds of every single one of our initial human data projects, ensuring that we nailed pilots with speed and quality.  There would be no Mercor without Surya.  I feel a sense of loss that I won’t see Surya on a daily basis. But, I am excited for all that is ahead. As Chairman, Surya will be supporting Mercor on all matters of strategic importance. Thank you Surya for the early years and setting us up to take the company to the next level. Q3 was our best quarter yet, and based on the early signs in October, Q4 will be even stronger. I feel very confident about our company's future. I write this out of gratitude. Surya has been my role model, thought partner, and most importantly, best friend. For the past 3 years, I have spent 14+ hours a day, 7 days a week with Surya. I have seen Surya grow up since he was an annoying, socially awkward 5th grader. I will have spent more time with Surya than my future wife by the time I get married. Going to Bluestone Lane with Surya every morning was the highlight of my days. Surya, I will miss you deeply. Thank you for everything you’ve done to build this company.

brendan keeps going on AI podcasts but @adarsh_exe and I just want to go on call her daddy

Mercor (@mercor_ai) scaled from $1-500M in revenue run rate in the last 17 months, making us the fastest growing company of all time. Our growth is accelerating. We averaged 11% week over week growth in July, 18% WoW growth in August, and 19% WoW growth in September. One trend driving this meteoric growth: the Economy is Becoming an RL Environment Machine. Reinforcement learning is becoming so effective that agents can hillclimb any benchmark, but humans need to define the rewards to automate everything. While everyone fears job loss, we’re creating a new category of knowledge work faster than any other time in history. The future of work will converge on training agents. We're paying out over $1M / day to people in our marketplace and hiring experts rapidly across nearly every domain: software engineers, doctors, lawyers, consultants, bankers, and many more.

looking forward to the long partnership ahead

Behind every great hire is someone who made the intro. So far, we’ve paid over $1M to people who simply shared a link. That's because great people know great people, and we’ve built a system to reward them. Mercor’s referral network is shaping the future of work, connecting top engineers, lawyers, doctors, and domain experts with frontier AI labs.

@annarmonaco amazing

Paradigm is the AI-native spreadsheet to eliminate menial work. Thousands of users have saved 10,000+ hours with Paradigm, and you can be next. Get your first month free today, then plans start at just $20/month.

@felicis congrats @speechu and team!

Here’s to the founders. We see what you see. We just raised $900M - our largest fund yet - to back those who are brave and daring enough to imagine the radically new.

@snaylalaa agreed

Mercor CEO is so finee

Mercor connects experts in their field with leading AI labs to test, challenge, and improve frontier AI models. Whether you’re a software engineer, PhD, consultant, or doctor, you can earn up to $200/hr while working on your own terms. Apply today at work.mercor.com.

Hiremaths on 🔝