alt Hacker NewsMechanical Turk had a good run, but not surprised it's shutting down. I'm sure the platform was getting flooded with people doing task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway.
I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI output is now the kind that requires domain expertise. This is what most full stack AI companies are bringing to industries.
Curious if this kind of work will come around again one day or was just a moment in time. If it does I'm sure it will be specifically about generating training data.
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It is weird because the last time I've heard about MTurk was about developing countries being rather reliant on it for doing AI grunt work. If am not totally wrong this must mean that the data work has moved to other services.
> task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway.
Oh, I remember UpWork.
I think yes but on different categories. First one I imagine is robotics control and support.
"This robot is having trouble folding a tshirt help it out for 1$"
Unless they go the waymo route of highly trusted people but I think mass deployed robots are a bit safer than a car for this.