Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, December 10th.

Today on Forbes, this 24-year-old built a multi-billion-dollar AI training empire in eight months.

If you're watching for indicators of AI market froth, the meteoric rise of Micro One is about as clear as it gets.

At the start of the year, it was an AI-powered recruitment service clearing roughly $7 million

annually. Now, eight months into a pivot into data annotation for AI training, it has crossed

$100 million in annualized revenue and fielded investment offers at

a $2.5 billion valuation.

Just several months ago, it closed the funding round valuing the company at $500 million.

It's been a wild ride for the company's 24-year-old CEO Ali Ansari, who is now on the cusp of becoming one of

the world's youngest billionaires. Should Micro 1 lock in or exceed the $2.5 billion valuation

currently being batted around by investors, Ansari's stake in the company, approximately

42 percent, would be worth over $1 billion, according to Forbes's estimates.

Ansari first became intrigued by AI training when a large data labeling firm came to them

seeking Micro One's help with recruitment.

Ansari said, quote, it was a mind-blowing project for us.

We were like, why is this company hiring hundreds

of engineers in two weeks? We said, holy shit, we should really focus on this market.

So like competitor Mercore, which also started out as an AI-powered recruiting service, Ansari

tilted micro 1 into data labeling. AI training, human annotation of the information used to train the large language models that undergird artificial intelligence,

is one of the most high-growth sectors in Silicon Valley right now.

In order for AI models to become so-called smarter, they need humans to add context and meaning

to the information they're trained on. Because AI's performance grows in direct relation to the

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