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▶ 58:39 · Robotics & Physical AI · Robotics data market nascent but poised for significant growth over next 3 years
episode briefing
20VC

Why Large Enterprise is Scared to Partner with Frontier Labs | Mercor Head of Product

2026-07-25 · 1 company · 5 thematic
sentiment
1 bull0 bear0 neu
speakers
oswald nitski

Oswald Nitski is CPO at Mercor, a hypergrowth company providing human evaluation and training data for frontier AI models; he previously worked at other hypergrowth startups and moved from Canada to San Francisco to join the AI ecosystem.

episode shorts · 1

Why Mercor Is Moving Away From Figma

now playing · Robotics & Physical AI
Enterprise AI Adoptionheadwindscore 8/10oswald nitski
Enterprises fear sharing core IP with frontier labs, creating data sensitivity barrier
Large enterprises are highly skeptical of sharing proprietary workflow data with frontier model providers; sensitivity is highest for core differentiated work (legal advice, medical decisio…
AI Economics & Business Modelstailwindscore 8/10oswald nitski
Token spend as % of salaries rising toward 100% at hypergrowth AI companies
At hypergrowth AI companies, token spend on coding agents and model inference already exceeds 100% of engineering salaries and is viewed as rational growth investment; macro trend suggests…
AI Infrastructuretailwindscore 8/10oswald nitski
RL environments and simulation data emerge as new frontier for model training bottlenecks
Reinforcement learning environments — high-fidelity simulations of apps (Salesforce, laptop OS) with complex start states — are the fastest-growing data type, replacing preference ranking a…
Cybersecuritytailwindscore 8/10oswald nitski
Cybersecurity data demand growing rapidly due to adversarial, uncapped reward dynamics
Unlike sufficiency-based workflows (CRM updates), cybersecurity is inherently adversarial with constantly moving goalposts between offense and defense, creating uncapped demand for evolving…
Robotics & Physical AItailwindscore 7/10oswald nitski
Robotics data market nascent but poised for significant growth over next 3 years
The data market for robotics (RL environments, simulation, real-world physical data) is currently small relative to GenAI and autonomous vehicles but will grow substantially as labs solve s…