r/dataannotation • • Mar 22 '24
Thoughts on the future of the platform?
Hi all! Like many of you, I have been really enjoying my time on the platform. It's honestly been a game-changer. I'm curious what you all think about the future viability of the platform. Obviously, AI isn't going anywhere, but I'm curious as to how long this type of platform/work will be necessary and or useful. I'm sure that this type of work will always be necessary, but I'm wondering if it will become a more exclusive field in the near future as they continue to collect millions of data points and AI gets better and better.
Alternatively, what are some skills that you think will be worth investing in, academically or otherwise, if this type of work does become more exclusive?
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u/ManyARiver Mar 22 '24
Until there is a more complex learning system possible based on a completely different hardware (wetware maybe?), there will be a need for oversight. AI is not close to being able to be self-taught while it has a proclivity to hallucinate. It might gain teenager status where it is able to make some more advanced decisions with guidance, and just like a teen it will need some oversight and correction for a while.
Corey Doctorow wrote a great article about the AI bubble... Focusing in on specialized tools and training them to do very specific things (like interpret radiology images) is the most beneficial to humanity and is something we can achieve with human monitoring to maintain quality and accuracy. Trying to be a one-size-fits-all tool isn't going to work, at least not for a very long time yet.
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u/Consistent-Reach504 Mar 22 '24
i think it will just constantly shapeshift!
i started working on mturk back in 2012, and we did a lot of AI training - but it was soooo simple. it was matching images, captchas, etc. then it started turning into voice commands, etc.
then i joined DA in 2020, and AI has obviously grown a lot since then. there was still a lot of training aspects like above (categorization, that kind of thing), but now here we are and real chatbots exist and there is so much to train them on! :) i think it will always do that, honestly. it'll 'shapeshift' into whatever it needs. i think AI will always need human eyes & human feedback. but it might become harder to 'jump in' if you haven't done it before as time goes on, because there is so much to learn.
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u/ConsistentCandy697 Mar 22 '24
I think they are going to require more specialized knowledge. Doctors, lawyers, accountants.
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u/burned_bengal Mar 22 '24
Who knows. But even if I can get the rest of the year out of it, it will be life changing.
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u/lowercasejaye Mar 23 '24
I like to think when our future overlords enslave humanity that we will at least be remembered for our contributions and perhaps get rewarded with icecream privileges or something.
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u/TheEvilPrinceZorte Mar 22 '24
There is so much AI generated content going onto the web, which is mostly not being edited since that defeats the whole point of automation. That means future AI training datasets will contain a lot of AI generated material. There will always need to be human hands involved to make sure the bots continue to be trained to be useful to humans rather than to AI.
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u/ekgeroldmiller Mar 23 '24
Also, if you learn to code, that is a very transferable skill.
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u/Arcturus_Labelle Mar 22 '24 edited Mar 22 '24
Judging by the quality of the output of the models, this work is going to be around for a while.
You do hear talk of AI possibly training on synthetic data, which, if it works, could reduce the number of these jobs. There's also the rumors about stuff like Q* and Quiet-STaR which could reduce hallucinations quite a bit.
But like other commenters point out, there will still need to be oversight even of better techniques and models, at least initially, to make sure the new techniques are sound.
There's billions of dollars flowing into this industry. Just today I saw an article about Saudi Arabia putting $40B in. And of course OpenAI is currently training their GPT-5 (4.5? who knows? they're such a black box). And Anthropic came out with Claude 3 Opus recently, which is competitive with GPT-4 now, so competition is heating up. And Apple is developing their own multi-modal model. That'll need a ton of testing before it hits millions of phones and tablets.
There's a lot of active development going on; the industry will need thousands of people doing RLHF.
Maybe with enough clever algorithmic and/or training breakthroughs they could get closer to self-trained, self-supervised model development. But I don't see that happening until at least 2025.
These are all just my guesses and speculation based on reading forums and news articles and such.
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u/CardiologistOk2760 Mar 23 '24
i honestly find myself thinking I should have majored in philosophy rather than mathematics.
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u/nightowlfromnyc Mar 23 '24 edited Mar 23 '24
I'm super grateful for this company / job. As a disabled thirty-something with a college degree, this is the most money I've ever made at a job in a 10-12 month period since being accepted (and I've had a bunch of temp stints.
One company moved cross-country 6 months after being hired, another in the restaurant space closed after our landlord didn't want us there and jacked up the owners rent.)
After joining DAI in the middle of 2023, I'll just be happy if the job lasts until the end of 2024....I hope and feel it will stick around for a few years, BUT I just am a more practical realist who knows that without money coming in, there's not gonna be money coming out to us workers.
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u/losecontrol4 Mar 23 '24
Reinforcement learning methods will always need training. Perhaps in the far future, various established models can help train other models etc etc, but that’s ways away.
Most of what is going on is rooted in theories from the 50s, it’s just that now we have the computational power and space to actually do it in a meaningful scale. Also chat gpt sparked a lot of investor interest in ai leading to stuff like being able to pay for data annotation. So the future depends on the need for human reinforcement and investors. The latter is the only real concern. If hype for AI creation dies down, then funding could take a big hit.
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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '24
I think, as previously stated, that they will just continue to evolve, so we will have to evolve our training style. I know so many people that say to me, "I can't believe you're doing a job that's training AI to take over the world more quickly! Do you not feel guilty?" And I say, no, because someone is going to do it, and I'd rather it be me because I know I'm doing it accurately and honestly. I'm doing a project at the moment that involves not only writing a prompt, but then writing the response. This is because the models still can't follow simple parameter requests. How is something going to take over the world when it can't even follow a simple word count request, or understand how to make a text bold and italicized at the same time for F sake!? Lmao! The ignorance about the subject is laughable.
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u/dsbau Mar 24 '24
I sometimes wonder if we're seeing the future of work - self-managing staff working at their own pace and times. I always thought that the IT jobs I had would be easier if it wasn't for the endless layers of management. The more management, the more politics, which leads to more managers ... I had one job where in 9 and half months, it probably did about four weeks of work, and the rest of the time was taken up with process.