I Built a Directory of AI Training Gig Platforms — Here's What I Learned in Week 1

TheAIGigs.com

As a Senior AI Engineer who builds RAG pipelines and agentic systems for a living, I spend a lot of time with models. But I recently started wondering — what if developers and ML practitioners could get paid to interact with AI models, not just build them?

That curiosity led me to build theaigigs.com — a free, no-fluff directory of platforms where you can find legitimate AI training and data annotation gigs. No job board. No AI features. Just a clean, curated list.

Why I Built It

The "AI trainer" economy is quietly exploding. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and hundreds of startups need humans to label and annotate training data, write and rate AI responses (RLHF), test model outputs for accuracy and safety, and create domain-specific datasets.

Platforms like Mercor, Outlier AI, Scale AI, DataAnnotation, Alignerr, Micro1, Appen, and Invisible AI are actively hiring for this kind of work — often remote, flexible, and surprisingly well-paid for the effort involved.

The problem? These platforms are scattered across the internet and hard to discover. Someone has to curate them. So I did.

What's on the Site

The directory currently lists 8 platforms with details on what kind of work each platform offers, skill requirements, how to get started, and what the pay looks like.

There's also a /getting-started guide for people who have never done AI training work before — because the onboarding process varies a lot platform to platform.

Week 1 Traffic Insights (Honest Numbers)

I launched quietly — no Product Hunt, no paid ads. Just a few posts and organic shares. Here's what the first week looked like:

Homepage: 104 visits

/directory: 16 visits

/getting-started: 12 visits

/platforms/mercor: 10 visits

/platforms/alignerr: 5 visits

/platforms/outlier-ai: 4 visits

A few things that surprised me:

36% of visitors were from the US — the highest-value audience for this type of platform.

/getting-started had strong intent. 12 visits in week 1 to a guide page means people aren't just browsing — they want to actually do something with this info.

Mercor dominated platform-specific pages. People are already searching for it — strong brand recognition in this space.

Who This Is For

If you're a developer, ML practitioner, or tech professional with domain knowledge in science, medicine, law, finance, or engineering — and you write clearly, think critically, and want to earn on the side without freelancing full projects — AI training gigs are genuinely worth exploring. Outlier AI and Mercor in particular are known for paying well for expert-level domain work.

The Stack

Keeping it deliberately simple — Vite + React + Tailwind CSS, static data in a single platforms.js file, deployed on Vercel free tier. No database, no auth, no API. The goal was to build something I could launch in a weekend and maintain in minutes per month.

What's Next

Individual platform deep-dive guides, a comparison table with pay rates and skill requirements, and community-submitted reviews for each platform.

Check it out at theaigigs.com. If you've worked on any of these platforms before — Mercor, Outlier, Scale AI, DataAnnotation — I'd love to hear your experience in the comments.

Built by a GenAI engineer who spends his days wiring LangGraph pipelines and occasionally wonders if the AI he's building will eventually come for his own job. Until then — might as well get paid to train it.