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.
Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
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Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#102Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It kind of reminds me of those fake tech ads those guys put up in the NYC subway: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bT...
I can't see this because I don't have an Instagram account
Yes, that’s true.
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?
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Any papers you'd recommend?
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#105Evil business, glad to be rid of it.
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#106MTurk existed since forever, and somehow flew under the radar for all these years. Very few developers I know didn't even know it existed.
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#107Cut off one mechanical turk and two more will rise to take it's place.
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#108So, 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 got…
> 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.
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
CEOs are loser nobodies. Real influence is with owners, boards, investors.
Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
#110Mechanical 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.
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.