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Silicon Valley bets big on ‘environments’ to train AI agents


A wave of startups are creating RL environments to help AI labs train agents. It might be Silicon Valley’s next craze in the making.

Surge — which reportedly generated$1.2 billion in revenue last year from working with AI labs like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta — recently spun up a new internal organization specifically tasked with building out RL environments, he said. Among them is Mechanize Work, a startup founded roughly six months ago with the audacious goal of “automating all jobs.” However, co-founder Matthew Barnett tells TechCrunch that his firm is starting with RL environments for AI coding agents. To this point, the startup is offering software engineers$500,000 salaries to build RL environments — far higher than an hourly contractor could earn working at Scale AI or Surge.

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