Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 72 posts

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#51

Post by Twirrim »

Back around 10 years ago, I gained a new manager who had previously managed mechanical turk. It was already recognised as a dead end back then.

I remember him talking about getting a mandate from Amazon Security to upgrade from the long EOL MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.something, and that it was almost impossible to get any resources committed from leadership to even do it despite the fact it was security requiring it (which usually resulted in everyone jumping before stopping to ask how high to jump). I want to say he ended up doing it himself? Something like that..

All existing extremely minimal headcount was tied up in a massive technical debt of KTLO work, and proposals to resolve those issues similarly met resourcing road-blocks.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#52

Post by DonHopkins »

vitally3643 wrote: post #43
moralestapia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Artificial AI" and "Artificial Artificial intelligence" are the same thing. Come on. This site can do better.

yes, this site can do a lot better than nitpicking acronyms

You can take that to the Automatic ATM Machine.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#53

Post by DonHopkins »

subarctic wrote: post #21
pc86 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were using LLMs in 2012?

Artificial AI = stuff like mechanical turk where they get humans to do stuff computers can't do and make it look like it's "AI" Artificial Artificial Intelligence = using computers to do mechanical turk jobs

If it wasn't made in the State of Artifice, then it's only Sparkling Intelligence.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#54

Post by DonHopkins »

root-parent wrote: post #16

I can see a high value startup, that will provide Human Intelligence with real Humans, locked in the room, with no network, books, LLMs and monitored 24x7 with cameras.

I'd pay for authentic artisnal fresh prison-to-screen Trump Truths produced that way.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#57

Post by skt5 »

AndrewOMartin wrote: post #30
skt5 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This likely means those consuming the outputs of Mechanical Turk don't have a good way to measure the value (aka quality) of the outputs. If they did - then they shouldn't care whether it's a human or a LLM. And if it's a LLM - then the cost will roughly correlate to the MIN(cost of the LLM, cost of a human) to do the task.

I think the "state of the art" of measuring the quality of outputs was to send the same task to multiple "agents" and only accept answers if over a certain amount agree. With some human review and reputation scoring sprinkled on top. It was a while since I was in this field though

This approach does work when there's a clear answer but what about tasks where the correct answer is multi-modal? Incentivizing agreement works only for tasks where there's clear answers.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#58

Post by nirav72 »

nullsmack wrote: post #4

I had no idea this was still around. It helped me buy a Battlefield 2 "Special Forces" expansion pack back in the day. Well, I could've bought it either way but buying it didn't impact my normal income because I did Mechanical Turk in my free time enough to get it.

That was a fun DLC. The zip lines were my favorite on the night maps.

Re: Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

#60

Post by neuroticnews25 »

icepush wrote: post #50
moralestapia wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Artificial AI" and "Artificial Artificial intelligence" are the same thing. Come on. This site can do better.

Are they? If one uses artificial in the sense of "fake" then a human pretending to be a machine AI would count as an artificial AI. The only scenario where this doesn't hold is if you are using "artificial" in the sense of "not created by nature".

The point is AI expands to Artificial Inteligence and Artificial AI expands to Artificial Artificial Inteligence.
Post reply on HN