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.
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.
There is training systems and validation of skills in mturk iirc: for tshirt folding, you'd be given fake setups to be able to get used to controlling the robot, if you can't do it, you won't ever get assignments to do it. For traffic overrides, you'd be tested on having correct knowledge, and once again given supervised tasks to show you can actually be trusted (and there would be safety systems, elevating tasks that can't be performed at your level to people who can, etc)
The worker needs to do a bunch to opt into any given work group, which makes the (lack of) payments extremely unreasonable on top of everything else
That's a remarkable idea. It could be heavily gamified, it could train models, and it might actually be mentally stimulating since you'd be facing different situations all the time.
Except, I'm a grown adult and I can't fold a t-shirt properly
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
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.
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...
> 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.
It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.
Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:
Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.
Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.
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 gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
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.
The concept behind it isn't going away. There are plenty of companies that hire people in bulk to do manual data labeling, transcription, RLHF, moderation and lots more. It's just that they are now catering to large AI companies, not regular people looking to get some repetitive work done (since that can now mostly be done by AI).
Had some absolutely bizarre results from their attempt to integrate mturk with Bedrock's 'ground truth' thing as of a few months ago. Threw simple mnist digits recognition at it, see what the quality, timing, and cost was. Figured mnist digits was at this point trivial. Spent $10 and the accuracy was marginally better than guessing, completely unusable results. Was completely baffled, people were publishing peer reviewed research based on exclusively mturk results.
Surprised Amazon managed to fumble mechanical turk at the same time Mercor/Scale and all these other companies started hiring humans to do data labeling tasks.
I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!
I made a couple thousand dollars off it squeezing in tasks here and there between meetings. Amazon Payments were challenging to redeem as I recall. I did more or less write the bulk of someone’s doctoral thesis. Kept giving me a dollar to summarize the findings of various psychology papers. The most memorable was the one where people were put in a room and someone sprayed “liquid ass” on the wall. The subjects given no explanation experienced higher levels of anxiety than those that were told there was a sewage leak being repaired. One of the strangest dollars I ever made. My PS4 and game collection was spectacular.
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.
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.
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.
There is training systems and validation of skills in mturk iirc: for tshirt folding, you'd be given fake setups to be able to get used to controlling the robot, if you can't do it, you won't ever get assignments to do it. For traffic overrides, you'd be tested on having correct knowledge, and once again given supervised tasks to show you can actually be trusted (and there would be safety systems, elevating tasks that can't be performed at your level to people who can, etc)
The worker needs to do a bunch to opt into any given work group, which makes the (lack of) payments extremely unreasonable on top of everything else
warioware shows it can be fun though but i'd indeed not like to see that applied to safety-critical tasks
That's a remarkable idea. It could be heavily gamified, it could train models, and it might actually be mentally stimulating since you'd be facing different situations all the time.
Except, I'm a grown adult and I can't fold a t-shirt properly
It could require listing your credentials to get you the proper tasks: doctor, lawyer, or tshirt folder
How could it come around again?
There are like three dozen companies selling similar services for generating AI training data.
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
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.
Sounds like your program manager was smart and valuable to the company. Do you have any plans to replace the service/data provided by MTurk?
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...
> 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.
can someone ELI5 because what in the office space
It was cheaper and less looser automated billing practices than current AI “solutions”?
20% of 0.07 was billed as 1 cent, not 1.4 or rounded up to 2.
1
Go watch Superman III for more details...
I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/
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...
Why it's Transactional Systems for Ephemeral Tasks, don't you know? No but same here. The other pages lead to more confusion.
My favourite part is the "our customers" section [0], starting with
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation
I am not sure if they want to convey what I think I am reading or not.
[0] https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers
I think it's a satirical website aimed at poking fun at corporate-linkedin-speak
Wish we didn’t even need one
It smells like they don't know what they're doing. Had a lol at the mission page accidentally implying their customers are unethical though:
> Our Customers
> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security ...
At least they’re ripe! I hate unripe customers, rife with astringency, sharp vegetal notes, and an unpleasant, unyielding texture.
What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?
The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope...
It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.
Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:
`wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'`
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets
Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.
Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.
Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.
I just remembered that in the story "Simulacron-3", there is ostensibly a law requiring people to respond to opinion polls. It is illegal to refuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3
Spoiler: gur jbeyq va juvpu gur ynj fhccbfrqyl rkvfgf vf n fvzhyngvba, perngrq ol be sbe cbyyfgref!
Exactly, it’s a beautiful thing when the market is rational https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CINT.ST/
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 gotten interested in the idea of doing Mechanical Turk for a few extra bucks. I thought there might be a formative scene of interested people doing this, so I started working on a blog for it. I briefly collaborated on it with another guy who put it on forum software because he didn’t know how to use, like Drupal.
That blog was called Turking.com, and it seemed like it was going well for a bit. We even got a mention on the AWS website. But after about two or three months, it was clear the initial excitement around the idea (and the initial work) had died down. (The work picked up later, but in clearly different ways. I don’t think folks were really “excited” about it after that point.)
If you want to get an idea of it, there was one capture on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124231722/http://www.turkin...
The site had started to die out in part because my iBook suffered a catastrophic GPU failure and me, being a broke small-town newspaper employee, did not have the money to replace it. Plus, the community just hadn’t emerged like we had expected.
But then I got an email out of the blue: Someone wanted to buy my domain, which I owned outright, but they didn’t want to say who. I got contacted by a broker, and the exchange took place over escrow.
(The domain most assuredly was bought by Amazon and is managed by MarkMonitor.)
I didn’t get a ton of money from the deal, but I did get enough to pay for a new laptop. I had some regrets about selling it (in part because I originally built the site with someone else), but I was in a bit of a dire financial situation which that proved to be the starting point for getting myself out of.
That domain purchase was notably more than I ever made from clicking and classifying random pictures, that said.
So did the other person just get hosed when you did your 'ipo'?
I explained the situation after the fact, and they were understanding. But certainly I admit that if I could do it again I probably would have clued them in sooner. The site had slowed down by the point this happened, so I’d describe it as a little more of a fire sale.
I learned a lot from that situation that I took to future sites.
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.
The concept behind it isn't going away. There are plenty of companies that hire people in bulk to do manual data labeling, transcription, RLHF, moderation and lots more. It's just that they are now catering to large AI companies, not regular people looking to get some repetitive work done (since that can now mostly be done by AI).
Right? Not to mention the training/tuning possibilities.
Mercor has a market value of $20B basically doing the same thing but desperately trying to find workers.
Rentahuman is still around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46868675
that was my first thought too, but i guess llms don’t need an api to hire humans
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Prior discussion from when the service stopped accepting new customers in July: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48803886
I did this a long time ago and it actually paid for a few meals.
They are terribly monotonous tasks.
I can see why it's shutting down if its still the same thing.
Lllms could probably do everything there without rotting out minds for basically pennies.
Instead we pay to rot our minds lol
The tagline for MTurk used to be “artificial artificial intelligence.”
It appears now we can get along with just a single “artificial.”
Had some absolutely bizarre results from their attempt to integrate mturk with Bedrock's 'ground truth' thing as of a few months ago. Threw simple mnist digits recognition at it, see what the quality, timing, and cost was. Figured mnist digits was at this point trivial. Spent $10 and the accuracy was marginally better than guessing, completely unusable results. Was completely baffled, people were publishing peer reviewed research based on exclusively mturk results.
I'll still be around on Oct 1.
Surprised Amazon managed to fumble mechanical turk at the same time Mercor/Scale and all these other companies started hiring humans to do data labeling tasks.
I used it to have people transcribe my dad’s handwritten letters and journals. It was touching to get notes from a “Turk” saying how much she enjoyed his travels and following the cast of characters in his life!
I was literally wondering this morning if mturk was still around! I assumed a lot of the stuff could just be done with LLMs and OCI now.
I wouldn't be surprised if Fiverr and Upwork start pulling back too. There's just so much AI bots now that have flooded the task marketplace.
I made a couple thousand dollars off it squeezing in tasks here and there between meetings. Amazon Payments were challenging to redeem as I recall. I did more or less write the bulk of someone’s doctoral thesis. Kept giving me a dollar to summarize the findings of various psychology papers. The most memorable was the one where people were put in a room and someone sprayed “liquid ass” on the wall. The subjects given no explanation experienced higher levels of anxiety than those that were told there was a sewage leak being repaired. One of the strangest dollars I ever made. My PS4 and game collection was spectacular.
End of an era.
Humans were once useful!
I wonder why.
bezos has determined LLM has replaced "on demand 24/7 workforce"
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