Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30 • Hacker News Board

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#121

Post by shortformblog » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:58 AM UTC

latexr wrote: post #108

shortformblog wrote: post #26

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 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.

I see you missed the point of the story. But whatever. I'm sorry my dire financial situation didn't tie up in a nice enough bow for you.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#122

Post by yashvg » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC

ZitchDog wrote: post #118

yashvg wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you make sure they aren’t using AI to pretend to be a domain expert? I’d think an AI would be pretty good at that.

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#123

Post by charlieyu1 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:04 AM UTC

Legend2440 wrote: post #30

timcobb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it come around again?

There are like three dozen companies selling similar services for generating AI training data.

Good data isn’t cheap and keeping it in-house gives you more control.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#124

Post by testplzignore » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

yashvg wrote: post #120

fireant wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some doctors are known to be a hip shooters making snap decisions, but is 30s really enough time for any kind of "expertise" from a real human?

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.

> Experts are vetted upfront by an AI interviewer

> till the AI is happy

My god this is dystopian.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#125

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #88

conception wrote: post #5

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.

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 rando…

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...

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#126

Post by donalhunt » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:22 AM UTC

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.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#127

Post by nlkingthree » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:27 AM UTC

donalhunt wrote: post #126

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 an…

I wonder whether AI would have found the aviator.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#128

Post by swiftcoder » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:47 AM UTC

toyg wrote: post #96

Yokohiii wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#129

Post by 21asdffdsa12 » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:48 AM UTC

nlkingthree wrote: post #127

donalhunt wrote: post #126

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 an…

I wonder whether AI would have found the aviator.

CIA should be good on that- find traces by man in wild nature..

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#130

Post by zackmorris » Thu, Aug 27, 2026, 11:54 AM UTC

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.

No jobs, no money, no billionaires.