02/22/2024

The Skilled Workers Training AI to Take Their Jobs

A workforce's embrace of data labor may make their future jobs obsolete

Jay fell in love with math at boarding school after a supportive physics teacher introduced him to the joy of complex calculus. He went on to study physics and math in college, hoping to one day similarly pass on what he'd learned to a new generation. That chance came in October 2022, when 25-year-old Jay answered a job listing seeking a math expert to grade equations through an online platform. But he would not be inspiring budding young mathematicians like his past self. He would instead be training an artificial intelligence system that may eventually make his expertise obsolete.

According to Jay, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his privacy, the system he was schooling had been built by a company soon to be a household name: OpenAI. His job was to act as an expert guide for the company's large language model—a machine-learning system that can convey information in a conversational format, like a chatbot—as it tried to improve its math. From his home in Portugal, he would tell the model if it was taking the right steps to solve math problems, adding thumbs up or thumbs down emojis to AI-generated answers, and sometimes writing out explanations about why the AI had gone wrong.

Jay said he knew he was training algorithms for the company overseen by Sam Altman because he was invited to join the OpenAI workspace in Slack. A screenshot he shared with WIRED shows he was part of a group, called “math trainers,” that was set up by the OpenAI researcher Yuri Burda. But Jay was not working directly for the famous AI company. Instead he was being paid by one of the world’s biggest data labor platforms, called Remotasks, a subsidiary of U.S. startup Scale AI, which was valued at more than $7 billion back in 2021 and counts OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and the U.S. Army among its clients.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.