Google is in talks to acquire Mechanize, a startup that creates high quality RL coding environments, for $1.5B. This is the biggest AI data business acquisition since Scale! Mechanize was founded ~1yr ago, and has a team 35-50 who are each paid ~$400k/yr to create ~1 good task/week for a cost of ~$8k/task. In their own words, “almost anything that you struggle to get coding agents to do could be a good task, if implemented correctly”. They were last valued at $500M 3mos ago. Jeff Dean,…