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Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

mturk.com

91–100 of 177 posts

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#91
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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#92
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…

"Fun" fact, they were also used by psychology/etc students when they need to do 'research' with X amount of people

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#93
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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#96
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…

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.

Probably AI models got good enough to bootstrap their own training systems.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#99
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.

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#100
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…

> task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway. Oh, I remember UpWork.

Oh ... upwork ... put offer, get 50 replies from people which jump for every penny without even being able to understand the task.
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