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Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

mturk.com

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Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#11

Post by madrox »

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#13

Post by x0xMaximus »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3
x0xMaximus wrote: post #2

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.

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

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...

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#14

Post by timcobb »

madrox wrote: post #11

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…

How could it come around again?

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#16

Post by madrox »

timcobb wrote: post #14
madrox wrote: post #11

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…

How could it come around again?

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

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#19

Post by johnsmith1840 »

madrox wrote: post #11

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…

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#20

Post by loremm »

x0xMaximus wrote: post #13
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

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 favori…

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/
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