Karen Hao

Because what you're describing is true for a very specific category of people, which is often like the business owners and leadership within companies that actually can make these decisions on how they spend their time and what they ultimately do with their time.

But what the piece talks about is the working class, like people who are not business owners that are then having to experience being laid off and then working for the data annotation industry, which is now one of the top jobs on LinkedIn, by the way.

Yeah, so LinkedIn had a report that showed the top 10 jobs with the highest growth in

in the last year, and data annotation is on that list.

Yeah, so data annotation is the process of teaching these chatbots or any AI system to do what they ultimately are able to do.

So the fact that ChatGPT can chat is because there were tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that were literally typing into a large language model and showing it, this is how you're supposed to then respond when a user types in a prompt like this.

Before they did that work, chat GPT didn't exist.

You would prompt the model and the model would generate some text that was not in dialogue with the person.

It would kind of generate something that was adjacently related.

So you do data annotation, which is literally showing lots of different...

You know, examples of things that you want the model to know.

And then reinforcement learning is getting the model to then train on those examples iteratively in a way that then gives the model some of those capabilities.

And what the New York Magazine piece highlighted is.

is many, many of the people that are getting laid off now or are struggling to find work.

And these are highly educated people.

They're college graduates, PhD graduates, law degree graduates, doctors, and again, like award-winning directors that are then struggling to find employment in the economy because the economy has been very much restructured by AI.

They are then finding themselves serving this industry

And the industry is designed in a way that is extremely inhumane because what the companies, the companies that use these data annotation services, like there's these third party providers that are data annotation firms.

An OpenAI, a Grok, a Google, they will hire these firms to then find the workers to perform the data annotation tasks that they need.

For these firms, these third-party firms, they are incentivized to pit workers against each other because they want this data annotation to happen at speed and as cheaply as possible so that they can also compete with one another in this middle layer to get the contract from the client.