Mechanical Turk was the original marketplace for cheap human labor behind AI datasets, and its slow wind-down closes the loop on an era when pennies-per-task crowdwork built the training corpora for early ML. With Amazon no longer accepting new customers, according to TechCrunch AI, requesters will have to look to modern annotation shops and RLHF vendors that have already priced human data work far above MTurk's historic rates.
Expect this to accelerate consolidation toward outfits like Scale AI, Surge, and their peers, who now command premium pricing for the same kind of human judgment MTurk once sold in bulk.
These may be the last days of Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
