A model is only as good as its data, and we’ve long since exhausted the internet. From here on out, model progress is gated by data producti…

A model is only as good as its data, and we’ve long since exhausted the internet. From here on out, model progress is gated by data production. @mercor_ai’s @BrendanFoody joined us at our Sovereign AI event to talk about how RL environments get built, and why your data might be your real moat: 00:00 Introduction 00:47 A short history of the data market: crowdsourcing to agentic data 02:29 What an RL environment is: worlds, apps, tasks 03:57 Why only humans can measure the frontier 05:35 Building verifiers is the hard part 06:44 Walkthrough: a real legal RL environment 08:18 Leaderboards — and what open weights change 09:45 Post-training results on Apex Agents 11:17 Three ways companies buy data 12:49 Q&A: How do you price data? 14:17 Q&A: What "data quality" actually means 16:42 Q&A: The misunderstanding about synthetic data 18:17 Q&A: Why RL environments now — and what comes after 21:20 Q&A: Can you scale rubric generation with models? 23:00 Q&A: RL environments for cyber defense 25:33 Q&A: Build data in-house or partner? Media

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Source: Sonya Huang (X) | 2026-08-12