All articles tagged with #data annotation
Indian rural and marginalised women working from home perform data annotation and content moderation to train AI, often viewing thousands of disturbing images and videos daily. The work exacts a heavy psychological toll—nightmares, emotional numbness, and long-term mental-health risks—while pay remains low and protections limited, all within a precarious NDAs-bound, globally connected AI supply chain.
xAI, led by college student Diego Pasini amid significant layoffs, is training its AI system Grok through a reduced data annotation team, highlighting rapid leadership changes and workforce reductions at the company.
Many workers involved in AI development, especially contractors and data labelers at companies like Google, Meta, and xAI, are being laid off as these companies restructure and shift focus, highlighting the precarious position of those handling the foundational work of AI development amidst increasing investments and industry changes.
Elon Musk's AI startup xAI laid off 500 employees, about one-third of its data annotation team, as part of a strategic shift to focus on expanding its specialist AI tutor roles in fields like STEM, finance, and medicine.
Google and Microsoft are partnering with Karya, a startup founded by a 27-year-old Stanford alum, to address the challenge of finding high-quality data in non-English languages for their AI products. Karya hires workers in rural areas of countries like India, Kenya, and the Philippines to collect and label data in vernacular languages, offering them higher wages than the industry standard. This partnership represents a shift in the economics of the data industry and aims to improve the representation of diverse languages in AI models, particularly for the nearly one billion potential users in India. Karya's efforts also focus on reducing gender biases in language models and fighting poverty through technology.
Annotators, or millions of people around the world working for generally low pay toiling away at monotonous tasks such as labeling photos of clothes, are a vital but hidden part of the AI industry. They work for companies that sell this data to big players for a steep price, all of which fosters a culture of secrecy. Annotators are usually forbidden from talking about their work, though they typically are kept in the dark about the big picture anyway.