Link: Why a $14 Billion Startup Is Now Hiring PhD’s to Train AI From Their Living Rooms

Scale used to primarily hire cheap labor in Africa, India and the Philippines to label autonomous vehicle sensor data—such as images of pedestrians, stoplights and traffic signs—for firms such Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise, or to tag shopping images for Meta’s Instagram. But lately, as money has started pouring into large-language models, Scale has shifted its focus to recruiting highly skilled contractors in the U.S. with the expertise to help train those models. About 300,000 of them take assignments through a Slack group run by Outlier, a Scale subsidiary. Scale’s shift highlights a little-understood reality—that human contractors play a crucial role in developing the latest AI systems. “It’s not just a bunch of programmers in a project somewhere telling the AI what to do and how to do it,” Mattingly said. “There’s a great deal of laborious human work going on to help train models.” #

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Yoooo, this is a quick note on a link that made me go, WTF? Find all past links here.