Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

End of an era.

I wonder why.

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