Guides
How AI expert work works, what it pays, how the platforms screen, and how to prepare. Written for professionals entering the field.
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What Is AI Evaluation Work?
An output, a set of instructions and a judgment to make. Understand the work, who uses it and where human reviewers fit into AI development.
Guide · 5 min read
Mercor alternatives for AI training work
Compare Mercor alternatives for AI training and evaluation work using current Sidequest data on open roles, advertised pay, fields and screening.
Guide · 7 min read
micro1 alternatives for AI training work
Compare micro1 alternatives for AI training and evaluation work using current Sidequest data on open roles, advertised pay, fields and screening.
Guide · 7 min read
AI Evaluation vs Data Annotation vs AI Training
The labels overlap. Separate the activity you perform from the way a team uses the resulting data.
Guide · 4 min read
Can You Work in AI Evaluation Without Coding Experience?
Yes, some tasks use research, writing and language judgment. Here is how to identify them and demonstrate the skills they require.
Guide · 4 min read
The AI Evaluation Tasks You’ll Actually Be Given
A practical map of scoring, ranking, fact-checking, writing and reviewing tasks, including what each submission needs to contain.
Guide · 5 min read
How to Grade a Single AI Response
Separate correctness, completeness and instruction following, then turn observed defects into a defensible score.
Guide · 5 min read
How AI Evaluation Rubrics Work
Understand dimensions, score anchors and calibration so your judgments follow the same rules as the rest of the project.
Guide · 4 min read
How to Compare Two AI Responses
Find the difference that matters, handle trade-offs and avoid rewarding verbosity or confidence.
Guide · 4 min read
How to Fact-Check an AI Answer
Break an answer into checkable claims, trace citations to their sources and distinguish false statements from missing evidence.
Guide · 4 min read
How to Write Strong Evaluation Justifications
Write short rationales that connect the criterion, the evidence and the consequence without repeating the whole response.
Guide · 5 min read
Prompt Writing and Reference Answers for AI Training
Design realistic tasks with checkable outcomes, then write reference answers that preserve constraints and withstand review.
Guide · 4 min read
How to Evaluate AI Agents and Multi-Step Tasks
Inspect the result, the tool-use record and the constraints an agent had to respect. A confident final message is only one piece of evidence.
Guide · 4 min read
Multimodal AI Evaluation: Text, Image, Audio and Video
Review outputs against the image, audio or video evidence they depend on, with attention to timing, visibility and cross-modal consistency.
Guide · 4 min read
Red-Teaming and Adversarial AI Evaluation
Design controlled tests of failure modes, record reproducible evidence and distinguish a useful finding from an unusual response.
Guide · 5 min read
How Finance AI Evaluation Tasks Are Scored
Review calculations, assumptions and document-based claims. The work is explaining where financial reasoning holds and where it breaks.
Guide · 4 min read
What Medical AI Reviewers Are Actually Asked to Judge
Separate factual support, clinical context and safety-sensitive omissions without treating a fluent answer as a clinical assessment.
Guide · 5 min read
How Coding and STEM AI Evaluation Works
Check specifications, reproduce results and distinguish a convincing explanation from code or reasoning that actually works.
Guide · 4 min read
What Language and Localization Evaluators Actually Review
Check meaning, register and local conventions while distinguishing genuine errors from valid variation.
Guide · 4 min read
How to Get Your First AI Evaluation Project
Choose a realistic task fit, prepare evidence of your skills and understand what must happen between applying and starting paid work.
Guide · 5 min read
AI Evaluation Pay: Rates, Paid Time and Project Availability
Understand what an advertised rate does and does not tell you, account for unpaid time and compare projects without inventing an income forecast.
Guide · 5 min read
How to Pass an AI Evaluation Interview or Assessment
Prepare to demonstrate your reasoning, follow the assessment rules and explain your experience without scripts or invented credentials.
Guide · 5 min read
Mercor vs micro1
Mercor and micro1 side by side — open roles, advertised rates, fields and screening from live Sidequest data — then how to compare a specific opportunity on either.
Guide · 6 min read
Data
AI training market report
Open listings, advertised hourly rates, hiring fields and platform activity, computed from the live Sidequest inventory on every visit.
Report · live data
Analysis and updates
Why Frontier Labs Pay a Premium for Domain Experts
Generic annotation is being automated away while expert evaluation budgets keep growing. The economic logic behind the split — and what it means for professionals.
5 min read
Hiring Signals: What Expert Platforms Are Recruiting for This Quarter
A roundup of the role types appearing most across Mercor, micro1, and other expert marketplaces — and what their screens now emphasize.
4 min read
Conference Watch: Benchmark Saturation Is a Hiring Signal
Every saturated benchmark at a major ML conference is followed by a harder, expert-written replacement — and those replacements are built by paid domain experts.
4 min read
From RLHF to Expert Feedback: The Research Behind Your Evaluation Job
Your evaluation job exists because of a specific research lineage — from the original human-feedback loop to today's expert-graded reasoning models. A plain-language tour.
6 min read