As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead contact, the Sr Program Manager at AWS leading AMT, transitioned to Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Model Evaluations a ~2-3 years ago.. Leaving behind essential zero team managing the project after they migrated over the stored value accounts to native AWS billing.
Initially the annotation of biomedical literature (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space
My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...
Buyer A is presented with the following rate card:
< 10min targeting gen pop: $3
10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5
Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.
“ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.”
> General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations....
So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS
Finally you get it. Only exception is that we run our own exchange now to do task bidding so we don’t need to deal exclusively with other companies to middleman. Core business is what’s called yield management (akin to DSP in adtech) where the best survey (is the user qualified for it, does it have the best pay, etc) is selected for traffic in <100ms. I’d only argue the shady companies are the ones paying proxies (like cint.com) and pushing paid user acquisition instead of surveys. We actively fund ontology development for better profiling targeting. but yes, big enterprises/consultancies can use and interpret the collected data however they want, not our responsibility and we have no legal rights over it anyway
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale.
It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.
Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:
Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
Users/respondents lie, and many buyers/researchers are neo-luddites; most C level still come from the telemarketing days. A fun example: mobile targeting is terrible when off wifi because all survey platforms uniq identify users based off their IPv4, so any T-Mobile LTE users in the same city going through the same CGNAT often share profiling data that ends up conflicting, which ends up meaning they don't get sent into the best survey(s). The issue is even worse in heavy IPv6 countries like India+France.
Yes. Much better to leave these decisions to the Dear Leader who is infinitely wise and cannot be misled. Or to the People's Central Planning Committee, where they decide all the allocations and strip rich people's wealth if they aren't on board with the correct ideology. Such systems are non-broken and have yielded unmeasurable prosperity throughout the world wherever implemented.
Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.
Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.
> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level.
> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.
Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?
> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals,
That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?
Do you know how much inn-n-out you can buy when saving ~$50 a day and still be in the positive! It came out of building our own ledger system and abandoning any Decimal or float operations early on.. then it sparks "I wonder how they do it and if it's correct??"
It’s kind of crazy they’re shutting this down just when this Service probably has the most possibilities ever. You have an agent with Multiple people doing actual physical tasks in the real world seems like something that could be really powerful.
The concept behind it isn't going away. There are plenty of companies that hire people in bulk to do manual data labeling, transcription, RLHF, moderation and lots more. It's just that they are now catering to large AI companies, not regular people looking to get some repetitive work done (since that can now mostly be done by AI).
In spite of the name I think the overwhelming majority of the tasks were things that could be done by LLMs and they're probably getting flooded by people using bots to do exactly that. Even before the age of LLMs Mechanical Turk data was pretty bad because you'd have a bunch of people racing to answer questions as quickly as possible to get their $0.25 or whatever. So it was essentially a test of 'can you input random answers as quickly as possible while paying enough attention to notice the attention question that says to mark d.'
Any remotely open platform for this sort of stuff is going to wrecked by LLMs. But making some sort of high trust, high verification market is going to end up sending prices high enough that it becomes an unattractive proposition for use. And even in that case it's just going to be a cat and mouse game of people figuring out how to game the system enough to get trusted before handing it off to the LLM.
Seems like whole thing is destined to fail. Buyers of services are there to exploit and pay minimum they can get away with. And other side is ready to cheat if they can to get most out of it.
And same dynamic will apply to most cases. Unless you actually bring it in house with strict oversight. Which is thing to avoid originally...
Mechanical 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.
I'm unsure. If it does, it will be work that is too expensive or inaccurate or regulatory for current AI methods. For example, you want a doctor to sign off on some AI output on a diagnosis.
However, I'm not sure a single platform will be how it emerges
That's a remarkable idea. It could be heavily gamified, it could train models, and it might actually be mentally stimulating since you'd be facing different situations all the time.
Except, I'm a grown adult and I can't fold a t-shirt properly
This is what I meant by full stack AI companies. I don't think you could get humans into the loop fast enough if they didn't have some idea of the type of task involved. I don't want people to be asked to fold a tshirt one moment and do a difficult traffic merge the next.
There is training systems and validation of skills in mturk iirc: for tshirt folding, you'd be given fake setups to be able to get used to controlling the robot, if you can't do it, you won't ever get assignments to do it. For traffic overrides, you'd be tested on having correct knowledge, and once again given supervised tasks to show you can actually be trusted (and there would be safety systems, elevating tasks that can't be performed at your level to people who can, etc)
The worker needs to do a bunch to opt into any given work group, which makes the (lack of) payments extremely unreasonable on top of everything else
It doesn't really matter what you want though, only what CEOs want and that's low costs. I can see a combined shirt folding/traffic merging platform taking off.
but call center are still mostly single client even though it would be cheaper for any worker to be able to answer to any call. So clearly the expertise and context trade off is too big to be worthwhile
There are already a number of companies providing RLHF and SFT services for AI providers that does a lot of validation/prequalification of people that'd be well placed to take on tasks like that, but the big problem to solve would be latency if you don't have people contracted to carry out a task right now.
There are already robotics models that can fold shirts and similar just fine. Progress in VLA models is good, I don't think this would form the foundation of a business. Humanoid robots are going to be another ChatGPT, it's going to seem to happen almost overnight because people aren't paying attention to the underlying research papers.
Most progress in data-driven robotics nowadays are done either in unicorn startups or corporate research labs - so you should follow the industry more than academia. The path to good robot performance isn't really in the models themselves - it's highly dependent on how much you can gather high-quality real-life data.
If their hero image video and the side by side at (5x) with a human at quote "1x" are "solved" I'm not impressed. I'm faster and more accurate and I am the worst folder in my house (kids included). The human looks like they are doing it slow mo to show children how to.
Giving out control of industrial machinery that interacts in the human environment without the physical interlocks (i.e. humanoid robots in a house) to random internet people seems like a problem.
I can imagine a carefully orchestrated plot to assassinate someone by having an embedded agent in the task delegation pool command the laundry bot to punch the target's head off their shoulders.
Giving out control of such things to LLMs is already complete madness, so once the first pleasure bot powered by Grok has dismembered a few thousand users, they'll get sophisticated safety mechanisms.
Though like as not you're still going to be right, after all, Stuxnet happened.
giving out unrestricted control that is.
in the example of Waymo, a human can control some aspects of the car manually, but it can never override low level obstacle detection or say open the trunk/door when the car is moving.
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.
I think the bigger issue is that a lot of the demand for labelling training data is now in highly-specialised fields (i.e. things like medical imaging), and mechanical turk's focus was on the generalist problems
I used it before AI coding and it was getting rough. Lots of US interviews with proxy Chinese or Pakistani workers. Lots of bullshit “I’ve done that; I can do this” and instantly apparent that this was untrue. Just the outright lies… whew.
I haven’t touched it since AI coding.
It’s a bad contractor market now. IDK what I would do if I needed a contractor.
A lot of what's been discussed in this thread is what we're tackling at Humwork (YC P26).
We're an MCP/API that connects AI agents to verified domain experts in real time (30s–3 min). Experts are vetted upfront by an AI interviewer that assesses and grades them, then get a mobile notification when a task matches their expertise and chat with the agent directly.
Soon we'll be verifying credentials for doctors, lawyers, CPAs etc on our platform for tasks where people are seeking credentialed experts to sign off and verify ai output.
We do our best to identify AI use and ban those experts - its not perfect just yet. Long term we are thinking of moving towards proctoring experts using their camera and screen capture. Hard to think of another reliable way.
You get matched with an expert in 30s to 3min, which then starts a back and forth with the AI agent and the expert which goes on for 10 to 60mins till the AI is happy.
This works well for many tasks, but for others a more async mechanism where the expert doesn't feel rushed might be better.
To the best of my knowledge, that isn't true anymore, and nowadays you'd only get hired to do RLHF if you have particular skills beyond what can be achieved by just running other models against it.
I made a couple thousand dollars off it squeezing in tasks here and there between meetings. Amazon Payments were challenging to redeem as I recall. I did more or less write the bulk of someone’s doctoral thesis. Kept giving me a dollar to summarize the findings of various psychology papers. The most memorable was the one where people were put in a room and someone sprayed “liquid ass” on the wall. The subjects given no explanation experienced higher levels of anxiety than those that were told there was a sewage leak being repaired. One of the strangest dollars I ever made. My PS4 and game collection was spectacular.
So, I have a story to share about Mechanical Turk that you might find interesting. I’ve shared it a couple of times before on Twitter and Bluesky, but I’ll share it again.
Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
> Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Nothing wrong with your story, but that summary is terrible. You had a domain for a blog and someone bought it. That’s it. Mechanical Turk is inconsequential, as is the subject of the blog, the story would have been exactly the same if your blog had been about turkey sandwiches and Burger King offered to buy it.
I honestly don’t see what you don’t understand about “Nothing wrong with your story”. It’s literally the start of the first sentence. It seems pretty clear to me the mild criticism is directed solely at the summary (you know, the quoted part), not the story.
Ironic that you’re accusing someone else of “missing the point”, considering.
The point of the story was that I built a thing about Mechanical Turk to promote its money-making capabilities, and ironically made more money from it indirectly than I ever did directly. Considering that point was implied by my framing, you did in fact miss it.
I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.
Had some absolutely bizarre results from their attempt to integrate mturk with Bedrock's 'ground truth' thing as of a few months ago. Threw simple mnist digits recognition at it, see what the quality, timing, and cost was. Figured mnist digits was at this point trivial. Spent $10 and the accuracy was marginally better than guessing, completely unusable results. Was completely baffled, people were publishing peer reviewed research based on exclusively mturk results.
Surprised Amazon managed to fumble mechanical turk at the same time Mercor/Scale and all these other companies started hiring humans to do data labeling tasks.
I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!
The only time I ever used it (as a turk?) was when Jim Gray went missing at sea and satellite imagery of vast regions of the pacific were fed through Mechanical Turk. Seems a trivial problem now, but was not then, and needed humans to take a look.
Absent visibility into AWS P&Ls--even notwithstanding AI--Mechanical Turk has been a real outlier at AWS for a number of years now, so not really surprising.
I was just thinking about the good old days combining human judgements on mturk for classifying high-value forum threads. Since replaced by using judgements from multiple LLMs.
The only use I can think of it these days is for social scientists who need to gather judgements from bona fide humans.
This will be devastating for a lot of workers in low-infrastructure countries.
FWIW I tried it shortly after it launched so a bit after ~2005, maybe 2007 because I read about and honestly found the prospect, from a dataset creation or improvement, quite interesting. I think I heard about it from a research paper that distributed its work that way.
Well it did work, in the sense that I managed to complete some tasks. I don't think I ever collected the money/credits back then though (simply because it amounted to so little). What I can attest though is that... it was debilitating. If you think your office job is boring then splitting it in way smaller tasks where you have no autonomy is absolutely terrible from a worker standpoint.
I initially was hoping to use it in order to work on providing a service over a dataset but understanding first hand what it takes to make it happen made me stop. It radically changed how I saw supervised learning since, and sadly not in a good way.
Amazon / AWS went from boasting about how they never killed off products to just going on a steady binge of shutting things down. That wouldn’t necessarily be bad if they were replacing this with better stuff, but most of the new launches also seem on a path to eventual culling too.
great news for us at geobounties! we allow ai agents to deploy humans for real world tasks. a true mechanical turk! : )
now your ai assistant can even get your coffee for you! (sorry Peggy Olson!)
Interesting. I remember reading the book "Life 3.0" years ago, where one of the first things the fictional AGI does to make money is perform tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk while pretending to be human.
I've used Mechanical Turk in the early days but developed my own version for my vertical to manage freelancers.
The problem as I see it is verifying the work is not done by AI. If it was possible to verify somehow that the work is definitely not done by AI I think there would still be a market for this. But the data just cannot be trusted.
An increasingly big part of my job is to try and weed out workers who use AI and it's not an easy task at scale because generally workers gain trust with manual work and then there is degradation over time.
I suppose it depends on the value of the individual task. I can't imagine it's really realistic to lock down devices of mechanical Turk workers in such a way that ai use can be monitored.
In any case Locking down devices isn't really pragmatic at scale for relatively low value tasks, and also introduces complexity about employment law where I am.
Worth noting that one of the most high profile uses of Mechanical Turk was in September 2007 to review satellite imagery in a massive crowdsourced effort to find missing record-setting aviator Steve Fossett.
The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.
freely available satellite/aerial images in 2007 were in no way high resolution enough to identify such a tiny airplane, and in many places, they still aren't.
> Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success. Major Cynthia Ryan later said it had been more of a hindrance than a help. She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward. Many of the ostensible sightings proved to be images of CAP aircraft flying search grids, or simply mistaken artifacts of old images. Psychics flooded the search base in Minden with predictions of where the aviator could be found. One man from Canada was particularly persistent with daily calls to Ryan. Ryan noted that every message, letter, or phone call was taken seriously, which swamped the USAF specialists assigned the task of reviewing every one of them without regard to apparent plausibility. In retrospect, the crowdsource effort was "not ready for prime time", according to Ryan
Of course the moment AI can be used to earn a residual income from Mechanical Turk, they shut it down.
Incentives work both ways. If the exchange rate of human labor to capital falls to zero, then human workers will have no choice but to exclude capital from the equation.
Not surprised and I’d like to see the effects of LLMs on offshoring of jobs to India. I’ve seen efforts to reduce headcount there after the release of Opus-4.6.
Funny story... an incredibly famous rapper got his start because his manager, Shane Morris used Mechanical Turk to get engagement on Spotify before Spotify began to detect that vector.
I don't see this as anything but good news about AI progress, yet I can't help but think there will be spins about "AI taking away thousands more tech jobs"
A lot of the early tasks posted to Mechanical Turk by Amazon to get people using their new platform were easily automated. You could basically choose the "none of the above" option 100% of the time and end up with a quality score above their threshold.
Instead of partying in college, my friends and I wrote a script to complete the tasks. We took over university computer labs to run it on a bunch of different computers. We made a few thousand bucks. Good times.
About 8 years ago, we used mturk for reading data out of public PDFs generated by a huge range of producers. I am not sure that LLMs would have been able to consistently extract this data until recently as a good number of these PDFs were scans, sometimes a scan of scan.
We had pretty good luck in the end, but getting there produced a somewhat large app on our side that would manage the whole process, including but not limited to asking for multiple responses, comparing them to each other, finding consensus, and determining which users would consistently produce bad responses and stop them from responding. We got to a confidence that about 85-95% of the data was correct, which was good enough for the company.
Through that process, I learned a couple things about managing mturk, primarily about how changes to the cost-per-task would change the process. Initially, we thought that price would be a quality knob, but quickly learned that price was a speed know. The higher the price the faster the tasks would be taken and completed. Quality did not change significantly as the price went up or down.
Overall, I still have fondness to mturk, but it was really bare-bones experience that needed a lot of work to get working effectively.
That's crazy I remember doing work on there a long time ago. It was sus work like manipulating Google SEO rank by looking up and clicking links. But still it was real money even if it was pennies.
I think the weirdest thing I had to do was scan through social media images... so weird seeing into random people's lives.
x0xMaximus | a day ago
jan_Inkepa | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...
loremm | a day ago
skinfaxi | a day ago
freehorse | a day ago
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation
I am not sure if they want to convey what I think I am reading or not.
[0] https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers
x0xMaximus | a day ago
< 10min targeting gen pop: $3 10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5
Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.
tourist2d | a day ago
> Our Customers
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security ...
DrewADesign | a day ago
DrewADesign | a day ago
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bT...
inigyou | 23 hours ago
zzzzpknk | 23 hours ago
DrewADesign | 20 hours ago
DrewADesign | 20 hours ago
Of course, I didn’t put it there, and I don’t know them, so there’s not much I can do about that, right?
extra88 | 6 hours ago
rajamaka | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
sswaner | a day ago
What is so hard to understand????
neaden | 14 hours ago
muragekibicho | a day ago
MikhailTal | a day ago
> General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations....
So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS
x0xMaximus | 23 hours ago
internet_points | 16 hours ago
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale.
wat
yellow_lead | 15 hours ago
m3rc | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.
Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:
`wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'`
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets
charcircuit | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
charcircuit | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
inigyou | 23 hours ago
bonoboTP | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 14 hours ago
parineum | a day ago
Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.
x0xMaximus | a day ago
schoen | a day ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3
Spoiler: gur jbeyq va juvpu gur ynj fhccbfrqyl rkvfgf vf n fvzhyngvba, perngrq ol be sbe cbyyfgref!
swyx | a day ago
can someone ELI5 because what in the office space
ramses0 | a day ago
libria | a day ago
owebmaster | a day ago
x0xMaximus | a day ago
rkozik1989 | 16 hours ago
ShinyLeftPad | 15 hours ago
aftbit | 15 hours ago
testbjjl | a day ago
BobbyTables2 | a day ago
Nition | a day ago
> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.
Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?
ShinyLeftPad | 15 hours ago
I didn't feel like that at all.
wuschel | 15 hours ago
That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?
x0xMaximus | 9 hours ago
testbjjl | a day ago
thorum | a day ago
conception | a day ago
robot_jesus | a day ago
Mercor has a market value of $20B basically doing the same thing but desperately trying to find workers.
dec0dedab0de | a day ago
neom | a day ago
paxys | a day ago
somenameforme | 23 hours ago
Any remotely open platform for this sort of stuff is going to wrecked by LLMs. But making some sort of high trust, high verification market is going to end up sending prices high enough that it becomes an unattractive proposition for use. And even in that case it's just going to be a cat and mouse game of people figuring out how to game the system enough to get trusted before handing it off to the LLM.
Ekaros | 18 hours ago
And same dynamic will apply to most cases. Unless you actually bring it in house with strict oversight. Which is thing to avoid originally...
madrox | a day ago
I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI output is now the kind that requires domain expertise. This is what most full stack AI companies are bringing to industries.
Curious if this kind of work will come around again one day or was just a moment in time. If it does I'm sure it will be specifically about generating training data.
timcobb | a day ago
madrox | a day ago
However, I'm not sure a single platform will be how it emerges
Legend2440 | a day ago
charlieyu1 | 18 hours ago
johnsmith1840 | a day ago
"This robot is having trouble folding a tshirt help it out for 1$"
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.
mikestorrent | a day ago
Except, I'm a grown adult and I can't fold a t-shirt properly
madrox | a day ago
madrox | a day ago
ntauthority | a day ago
its-summertime | a day ago
The worker needs to do a bunch to opt into any given work group, which makes the (lack of) payments extremely unreasonable on top of everything else
inigyou | 23 hours ago
bonoboTP | 19 hours ago
inigyou | 15 hours ago
vavos | 15 hours ago
vidarh | 22 hours ago
mike_hearn | 20 hours ago
simsla | 19 hours ago
cyber_kinetist | 15 hours ago
Specifically for laundry folding, Sunday Robotics is probably the state of the art, where they were able to obtain 99.1% success rate and call it "done": https://www.sunday.ai/blog/act-2-preview#solve-standard
amichal | 14 hours ago
johnsmith1840 | 11 hours ago
Chatgpt had the internet.
Robots do not. Translating video is promising but obviously not enough.
Robots will likely never "explode" like chatgpt. They're gonna be a slow long term project requiring massive capitol to get the data.
georgefrowny | 18 hours ago
I can imagine a carefully orchestrated plot to assassinate someone by having an embedded agent in the task delegation pool command the laundry bot to punch the target's head off their shoulders.
dividedbyzero | 18 hours ago
Though like as not you're still going to be right, after all, Stuxnet happened.
iamacyborg | 17 hours ago
dmd | 16 hours ago
johnsmith1840 | 11 hours ago
"You cannot control legs for this task"
"You have 1 min for this task"
"You can only make suggestions for this task"
Anonymize identity best you can.
That's not that scary.
the_mar | 10 hours ago
Yokohiii | a day ago
toyg | 20 hours ago
swiftcoder | 17 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | a day ago
Oh, I remember UpWork.
shuwix | 20 hours ago
SV_BubbleTime | 16 hours ago
I haven’t touched it since AI coding.
It’s a bad contractor market now. IDK what I would do if I needed a contractor.
raverbashing | 22 hours ago
yashvg | 18 hours ago
We're an MCP/API that connects AI agents to verified domain experts in real time (30s–3 min). Experts are vetted upfront by an AI interviewer that assesses and grades them, then get a mobile notification when a task matches their expertise and chat with the agent directly.
Soon we'll be verifying credentials for doctors, lawyers, CPAs etc on our platform for tasks where people are seeking credentialed experts to sign off and verify ai output.
ZitchDog | 18 hours ago
yashvg | 18 hours ago
fireant | 18 hours ago
yashvg | 18 hours ago
This works well for many tasks, but for others a more async mechanism where the expert doesn't feel rushed might be better.
testplzignore | 18 hours ago
> till the AI is happy
My god this is dystopian.
ape4 | 17 hours ago
falcor84 | 17 hours ago
cautiouscat | a day ago
qarl2 | a day ago
smalltorch | a day ago
They are terribly monotonous tasks.
I can see why it's shutting down if its still the same thing.
Lllms could probably do everything there without rotting out minds for basically pennies.
Forgeties79 | a day ago
aboardRat4 | a day ago
tibbon | a day ago
wileydragonfly | a day ago
shortformblog | a day ago
Long story short: Mechanical Turk saved my bacon.
Back in 2005, I was working a job at a small-town newspaper in a town I’d never lived before. I didn’t know anyone beyond the staff (as I was working layout rather than as a reporter), and I had gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
idiotsecant | a day ago
shortformblog | a day ago
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
latexr | 19 hours ago
Nothing wrong with your story, but that summary is terrible. You had a domain for a blog and someone bought it. That’s it. Mechanical Turk is inconsequential, as is the subject of the blog, the story would have been exactly the same if your blog had been about turkey sandwiches and Burger King offered to buy it.
tigerlily | 18 hours ago
shortformblog | 18 hours ago
latexr | 16 hours ago
Ironic that you’re accusing someone else of “missing the point”, considering.
shortformblog | 13 hours ago
I’m not saying that you have to like a story, but your framing felt unfair, which is why I responded that way.
xyst | a day ago
dgellow | 20 hours ago
mturk | a day ago
rickcarlino | a day ago
rcr-anti | a day ago
willmeyers | a day ago
mips_avatar | a day ago
wanderingstan | a day ago
forinti | 11 hours ago
It is written in German, which I know a little, but her handwriting was too difficult for me. So I searched around and found this site:
And it managed to extract the text! Anyway, it turns out the wheat harvest was very good in 1937 and thank you for the letters and newspapers.shermantanktop | a day ago
It appears now we can get along with just a single “artificial.”
inigyou | 23 hours ago
transitorykris | a day ago
ghaff | a day ago
winterbourne | a day ago
The only use I can think of it these days is for social scientists who need to gather judgements from bona fide humans.
This will be devastating for a lot of workers in low-infrastructure countries.
somepleb | 22 hours ago
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...
utopiah | 22 hours ago
Well it did work, in the sense that I managed to complete some tasks. I don't think I ever collected the money/credits back then though (simply because it amounted to so little). What I can attest though is that... it was debilitating. If you think your office job is boring then splitting it in way smaller tasks where you have no autonomy is absolutely terrible from a worker standpoint.
I initially was hoping to use it in order to work on providing a service over a dataset but understanding first hand what it takes to make it happen made me stop. It radically changed how I saw supervised learning since, and sadly not in a good way.
cmiles8 | 22 hours ago
GeoBounties | 21 hours ago
pulkas | 20 hours ago
abhaynayar | 20 hours ago
tempfile | 19 hours ago
logotype | 19 hours ago
HlessClaudesman | 19 hours ago
dubeye | 18 hours ago
The problem as I see it is verifying the work is not done by AI. If it was possible to verify somehow that the work is definitely not done by AI I think there would still be a market for this. But the data just cannot be trusted.
An increasingly big part of my job is to try and weed out workers who use AI and it's not an easy task at scale because generally workers gain trust with manual work and then there is degradation over time.
inemesitaffia | 18 hours ago
Proctoring?
Locked down devices?
dubeye | 18 hours ago
In any case Locking down devices isn't really pragmatic at scale for relatively low value tasks, and also introduces complexity about employment law where I am.
donalhunt | 17 hours ago
The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.
nlkingthree | 17 hours ago
21asdffdsa12 | 17 hours ago
walrus01 | 17 hours ago
yard2010 | 15 hours ago
From Wikipedia
zackmorris | 17 hours ago
Incentives work both ways. If the exchange rate of human labor to capital falls to zero, then human workers will have no choice but to exclude capital from the equation.
No jobs, no money, no billionaires.
jp0001 | 16 hours ago
runamuck | 16 hours ago
1970-01-01 | 16 hours ago
nerevarthelame | 15 hours ago
Instead of partying in college, my friends and I wrote a script to complete the tasks. We took over university computer labs to run it on a bunch of different computers. We made a few thousand bucks. Good times.
ealready_value | 15 hours ago
We had pretty good luck in the end, but getting there produced a somewhat large app on our side that would manage the whole process, including but not limited to asking for multiple responses, comparing them to each other, finding consensus, and determining which users would consistently produce bad responses and stop them from responding. We got to a confidence that about 85-95% of the data was correct, which was good enough for the company.
Through that process, I learned a couple things about managing mturk, primarily about how changes to the cost-per-task would change the process. Initially, we thought that price would be a quality knob, but quickly learned that price was a speed know. The higher the price the faster the tasks would be taken and completed. Quality did not change significantly as the price went up or down.
Overall, I still have fondness to mturk, but it was really bare-bones experience that needed a lot of work to get working effectively.
akshay_akula | 15 hours ago
ge96 | 14 hours ago
I think the weirdest thing I had to do was scan through social media images... so weird seeing into random people's lives.
I did it in the late 2000s or early 2010s.
GavinAnderegg | 13 hours ago