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ChatGPT is powered by contractors making $15 an hour
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xwdv 3y ago$15/hr is a living wage, and pretty good for such easy work you can do from home with little to no training. Many would love to have this job.
- ceejayoz 3y agoNo benefits eats into that quite a bit.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI would do this part time for extra income. Going to look into it
- sandworm101 3y agoLiving wage? Maybe in central Africa. That won't cover rent+food is most north American cities.
- messe 3y ago> Living wage? Maybe in central Africa Get out of your bubble. It's a living wage in a good chunk of Western Europe.
- falcolas 3y agoThese people don't live in Europe. They live in the US. They'd be paid accordingly less if they lived in Europe. Though they'd probably have better safety nets.
- sandworm101 3y agoBut this is in the USA, the land of paid healthcare and limited safety nets. 15 is a knife-edge existence in US cities.
- kevingadd 3y agoSure, and there are a bunch of countries where the average wage is the equivalent of $2/hr. Is that where the contractors in question live? Then it's not a meaningful point of comparison.
- falcolas 3y ago$30,000 a year is barely a living wage now. Especially if you have a partner, let alone a child. Rent for a 1br apartment rent (in Kansas City) would take about half of that income every month. $30k just above the poverty line for the lower 48, and it is the poverty line if you have the audacity to have two children. Inflation has hit reality pretty fucking hard; we need to adjust our mental models to match that reality again.
- ITB 3y agoPeople who are at the bottom of the income pyramid should prefer partners that also have an income.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoShould prefer, but even if they do, they and their partner's continuing prospects are also more precarious than those higher up the income pyramid.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> $30k just above the poverty line for the lower 48, More then double for the 48 contiguous states (“lower 48” only made sense as a synonym for 8½ months in 1949) plus DC. > and it is the poverty line if you have the audacity to have two children. If you have a family of four with one income, to be precise.
- falcolas 3y ago> More then double $15k in Kansas city wouldn't even get you a studio apartment, let alone the extras like food or water. Doubling "can't even get a roof over your head" isn't exactly something to be proud of. But sure, for one person, you're living the life at a bit over 2x the poverty level pre-tax. > “lower 48” only made sense as a synonym for 8½ months in 1949 And yet the meaning was clear - why argue about it? > to be precise. What was imprecise about $30k being poverty level for a family with two children?
- kevingadd 3y agoA living wage where? Where these contractors live?
- 6nf 3y agoSoon the AI will take even those jobs as we use AI to align our AIs.
- bbor 3y agoAlready working on it :) https://www.anthropic.com/index/constitutional-ai-harmlessness-from-ai-feedback https://www.anthropic.com/index/constitutional-ai-harmlessne...
- Kuinox 3y agoThis is more than minimum wage in France.
- falcolas 3y agoTechnically in the US too. But rent would still cost you about half of that pre-tax income.
- ITB 3y agoPeople can share houses. I did until I was 35
- falcolas 3y agoSure. Roommates have been a thing since forever. A few things make that harder though: - Having a partner - Having a child - Working from home - The more roommates, the larger the apartment/house, the larger the costs And that's a solution for only one of the things required to live.
- kristianp 3y agoA partner is just a room-mate if you look at it economically.
- bugglebeetle 3y agoYou say this like it should be aspirational.
- adventured 3y agoAt ~$30,000 annualized, it's higher than the median income in the EU, Germany or France.
- falcolas 3y agoAnd lower than the median income for the US. Gotta compare those wages to where you're earning them, otherwise we're all "effective billionaires" because we don't live where the average income is under $2 an hour.
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago$15 an hour, are you kidding me? That's a lot. Hard to believe, to be honest. Could be just a positive PR article.
- 6nf 3y agoAustralian McDonald’s money
- escapedmoose 3y agoBut no benefits :(
- ma2rten 3y agoIt's below minimum wage in California.
- KMnO4 3y agoAnd above minimum wage in Kansas, where they are located.
- falcolas 3y agoToo bad minimum wage doesn't mean "a wage you can live on", or that argument might mean something.
- ITB 3y agoLifestyle costs will always escape minimum wage because it’s such a huge lever that the entire economy gets propped up on higher min wages. The only way around it is for people to after jobs that earn a premium to minimum wage. I don’t think the bottom of the economic scale will ever be a pleasant please to be at.
- falcolas 3y agoI don't believe I'm talking about some kind of special lifestyle. I'm talking about living. As in being able to have a roof, sufficient nutritious food, heating, transportation, even some basic entertainment, all without having to hold multiple jobs.
- mirekrusin 3y agoWhat about open source authors? Wikipedia contributors? Artists?
- elbigbad 3y agoI always thought Wikipedia contributors and open source authors were unpaid?
- mirekrusin 3y agoExactly and their work does power ChatGPT, who's going to write article about them?
- version_five 3y agoIt says "$15 (USD) an hour and up". That's better than uber or other gig work, and honestly probably pretty attractive for a lot of people. What should the wage be? There was a story a few months ago about offshore contractors making $2/hour to do content filtering. Even that I belive was a good local wage, but in comparison, this $15 job seems pretty generous.
- adventured 3y agoDepends on the location. I'm in a college town, Uber drivers here are commonly doing better than $15 / hr. They do well enough that Uber has consumed a bunch of the labor pool for service jobs that pay around $15 (leaving retailers complaining).
- SoftTalker 3y agoIncluding the wear and tear on their car? And having proper insurance (some insurance won't cover a personal car used for work unless you have that coverage specifically added).
- adventured 3y agoAll the other wage comparable jobs don't include wear and tear either (whether on a vehicle or on your body / mind). What kind of price tag do we put on your soul being gutted at McDonalds or CVS, standing at a register all day dealing with entitled jerks as a CSA.
- version_five 3y ago> What kind of price tag do we put on your soul being gutted at McDonalds or CVS, standing at a register all day dealing with entitled jerks as a CSA. Is this a serious question? That's what the wage is for. It's an amount that convinces people to spend their time at the job. If on top of that, they also need to depreciate a capital asset, as with uber driving, the effective net amount they earn is lower, which is what is being discussed.
- personjerry 3y agoWhy is this surprising? For comparison, your fish is 'powered by contractors' making $0.1 an hour in Africa or the Caribbean. Then people import and refine the product and sell it to you for $30 in the restaurant as a value-add. That's how the economy works.
- deweller 3y agoI expect the headline is meant to garner attention because of the contrast between the $15/hour data labelers and the $100+/hour information age white collar workers that people fear AI will replace.
- personjerry 3y agoYeah, but it's the same paradigm that follows industry, we just stopped paying attention to the others.
- revertmean 3y agoNo, my fish isn't. Your fish might be, but that's a you problem.
- thiht 3y agorevertmean’s fish is ethically fished, we’re fine guys.
- 12354278645 3y agoThere are already people in the comments complaining that $15/hr is "plenty" (people who, I'll hazard to wager, make at least twice that). I made $15/hr working at Best Buy, and that was a job where I was paid to move around the store, interact (mostly positively) with customers and coworkers, perform a variety of relatively engaging tasks, and got benefits/paid breaks/etc. It was not enough to live on; I dipped into savings every month. $15 to sit on a computer, labeling photos, in 2023, sounds much less an agreeable situation. And I should know: I also did a temp data entry contract, sitting in a room by myself for 8 hours, doing the same thing over and over, for ~$12/hr (essentially the same pay wrt inflation). Likewise, I was not making ends meet and dipping into savings for the 2 months I was doing that job. I'd really like people who are comparatively better-off to stop telling us what's "enough". $15/hr was a good wage to shoot for when the "raise the wage" movement started more than a decade (!) ago. It's been almost 15 years of near-zero interest rates and the attendant inflation, exacerbated by several crises that required money-printing to keep the economy out of a recession. Maybe some assets could stand to be devalued to allow workers to receive what is actually a living wage today (which would be north of $20/hr).
- ITB 3y agoIf there are enough people willing to do it, then it’s the market rate. Regardless of whether it’s enough by one standard or another.
- kevingadd 3y agoThis seems entirely separate from the comment you're replying to, though.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoGP said nothing about market rate. A reply talking about the market rate is like a Christian telling a bunch of Jews that it's okay that they ate pork because Jesus forgives their sins.
- junofan 3y agoThe guy in the article says it’s one of the things that got him out of homelessness. Yeah sure we could all make more money, but seems like for this guy it was a good opportunity.
- akira2501 3y agoThe "AI revolution?" When did that actually start? Why did the title need to be editorialized in this way? The actual article is much more reasonable in it's title "OpenAI Contractors make $15/hr to train ChatGPT." The constant embarrassed need to make this iteration of a computer model into not only "AI" but "revolutionary" is absurd and taxing.
- dang 3y agoWe've reverted the title now. Submitted title was ("The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour")
- RosanaAnaDana 3y agoI ran a GIS chop shop for a while. We found outsourcing digitization was a waste of time/ money. We paid very competitively for competent digitzers. And no ours were not contractors. Full time if they wanted it, plus good enough benefits. More demand that we could handle so it wasnt an issue.
- joshjdr 3y agoThat the industry is creating new $15/hr jobs isn’t the most interesting part of this… > Jatin Kumar, a 22-year-old in Austin, Texas, said he’s been doing AI work on contract for a year since he graduated college with a degree in computer science, and he said it gives him a sneak peak into where generative AI technology is headed in the near-term. “What it allows you to do is start thinking about ways to use this technology before it hits public markets,” Kumar said. He’s also working on his own tech startup, Bonsai, which is making software to help with hospital billing. A conversational trainer, Kumar said his main work has been generating prompts: participating in a back-and-forth conversation with chatbot technology that’s part of the long process of training AI systems. The tasks have grown more complex with experience, he said, but they started off very simple. “Every 45 or 30 minutes, you’d get a new task, generating new prompts,” he said. The prompts might be as simple as, “What is the capital of France?” he said. Kumar said he worked with about 100 other contractors on tasks to generate training data, correct answers and fine-tune the model by giving feedback on answers. He said other workers handled “flagged” conversations: reading over examples submitted by ChatGPT users who, for one reason or another, reported the chatbot’s answer back to the company for review. When a flagged conversation comes in, he said, it’s sorted based on the type of error involved and then used in further training of the AI models. “Initially, it started off as a way for me to help out at OpenAI and learn about existing technologies,” Kumar said. “But now, I can’t see myself stepping away from this role.”
- nitwit005 3y agoUnfortunately, any job that you can do from home, with few skills required, and flexible hours, is going to pay poorly. Too many people will want the job. They only need to pay the wage that the population in the lowest cost of living areas will accept.
- ftxbro 3y ago> The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour Or it's powered by data centers filled with tens of thousands of GPGPU accelerator chips and a layer stacking architecture. The ones paid hourly are actually lobotomizing the AIs to make them stupider and more docile. You can learn more about this from the youtube interviews with red teamers and bing integration devs who had access to the raw base models.
- leobg 3y agoAny links to those videos/interviews? I’d be curious to listen to them. Thanks.
- ftxbro 3y agoHere are two. First one is Nathan Labenz who ended up Red Teaming for OpenAI during the six months after the base model was fully trained but before it was released (especially relevant parts are after 45 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLiheMQayNE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLiheMQayNE Other one is Sebastien Bubeck who put Sydney into Bing before she was tamed down some notches; he explains the lobotomization process in a particularly poignant way, where they had the GPT keep trying to draw a unicorn even as it was progressively deadened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbIk7-JPB2c
- revelio 3y agoThe relevant comment from the second video is here: https://youtu.be/qbIk7-JPB2c?t=1584 https://youtu.be/qbIk7-JPB2c?t=1584 He says that GPT-4 started out being much better than GPT-3.5 at this task (draw a unicorn in TikZ), as the model trained longer it got to the point of drawing a great unicorn, but as it was tuned for "safety" it regressed to the point of being no better than GPT-3 was. Quite sad, in a way. It's not totally clear why there should be a tradeoff between "safety" and drawing skill / intelligence in this way. But it's interesting to speculate by analogy to humans.
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- ITB 3y agoThe best way for everyone to live a decent life is for our technology to keep reducing costs of everything. Unfortunately, a big driver of costs is employees. But if we replace all people, then medicine and education become very cheap. Can’t have it both ways though. It hurts while you’re in the middle of it.
- faeriechangling 3y agoA society where costs are low is a society where inequality inevitably becomes more severe. If you get rid of the cost of employees for pharmaceutical prices, pharmaceuticals prices don’t go down, R&D may go up somewhat (since ROI would improve) but in reality pharma’s costs going down will only make them redistribute less money to the local economy through wages. The whole neoliberal idea that if you reduce costs to consumers (particularly those related to wages and staffing levels), public welfare improves, was always totally naive to the reality that this approach generally tends to turn a blind eye towards consolidation of economic power and a decline in the negotiating power of the commons. You can even create a tragedy of the commons amongst these corporations where they all grow slowly because of collective over-exploitation.
- 01100011 3y agoHow does one get one of these jobs? It sounds like a nice WFH gig for folks like my wife who don't really want full-time and don't need benefits.
- CamperBob2 3y agoParadoxically, we have another front-page story in which the OpenAI CEO states that the WFH experiment is over and declares it a failure. So your wife may be SOL on the WFH thing, it sounds like. Either that or the CEO of OpenAI is being a raving hypocrite. But I'm sure that's not it. (Downvoters are welcome to explain why sauce for a goose is unsuitable for a gander.)
- earthling8118 3y agoWho would've thought the CEO of O̶p̶e̶n̶AI would be a hypocrite? Color me shocked.
- TACIXAT 3y agoI have a low volume of this work available. If your wife wants to help beta test a site where annotators bid their own rates I would be thrilled. Contact in bio.
- Scoundreller 3y agoCan start off here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TELUSinternational/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TELUSinternational/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Lionbridge/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Lionbridge/ https://www.telusinternational.com/solutions/ai-data-solutions https://www.telusinternational.com/solutions/ai-data-solutio... https://jobs.telusinternational.com/en_US/careers/aicommunity/ https://jobs.telusinternational.com/en_US/careers/aicommunit...
- mxkopy 3y agoI find it so utterly silly that they need an army of people to make the AI usable - wasn't the whole point that an AI could replace an army of people?
- dudul 3y agoThe job application ( https://boards.eu.greenhouse.io/invisibletech/jobs/4151793101?gh_src=97c43bd2teu https://boards.eu.greenhouse.io/invisibletech/jobs/415179310... ) has some weird requirements. Asking for screenshots of your laptop serial number and all. I get the hardware (sort of) but the serial number and computer name?
- ceejayoz 3y agoI'd imagine this is to prevent one person from registering 200 accounts and automating the job via ChatGPT.
- faeriechangling 3y agoSalary seems perfectly reasonable for the area. Maybe my heart is hardened a bit by the stories of ChatGPTs $2/hr contractors but the standard of living in Kansas city on $15/hr by international norms is at least middle of the road. As much as people clamour for a living wage (a target which is fixed to housing prices and will never be reached by a society housed by private landlords even if employers all adopted the prevailing living wage tomorrow), it’s essentially the global middle complaining about not being the global upper-middle class. If you want to do something about inequality break up Microsoft.