Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing bonus story of the week. Today on Forbes, the world's youngest

self-made billionaires just slashed these workers' wages. Merckor's co-founders last month

became billionaires after raising $350 million on a $10 billion valuation for the AI training startup.

Just over a week later, they allegedly canned an AI project that involved thousands of

contractors.

Hours later, it offered to rehire the workers on a lower hourly rate, according to several

people impacted.

Contractors who worked with startup Mercore say they found

themselves locked out of Slack last week after the AI training project they worked on was

abruptly scrapped. The San Francisco startup, which was valued at $10 billion last month,

allegedly emailed contractors last Wednesday to inform them that the project code named

Mousen had been canceled. Forbes spoke with five Merckor contractors who worked on the project,

which was focused on reviewing video and audio from Meta's Facebook and Instagram short video

platform Reels. The contractors were part of a Slack group that shared updates on the project

that at one point included over 5,000 people, according to these contractors. Contractors told Forbes

that they had been working on the project for several months, and Merckor managers had told

them in October that the project was expected to run until at least December.

Mercord did not officially identify the client behind the project,

but workers were told it was meta and described exclusively working with content from meta's social media apps to train AIs to identify people and products in short form videos.

All of the contractors interviewed requested not to be named or identified.

One told Forbes, quote,

It was all very sudden.

...