Market Analysis Stock Picks Market Insight Crypto Stocks to Buy Hot Stocks The human labor behind yesterday’s AI models is returning as the critical bottleneck behind physical AI Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005 as “artificial artificial intelligence,” shows that hidden human labor has always been the real engine behind AI’s biggest claims – and Amazon is now retiring it. A 19-year-old college dropout spotted this bottleneck in 2016, built a company around solving it, and eventually sold a stake in it to Meta for $14.3 billion. Tesla turned millions of ordinary drivers into an unpaid data-collection fleet, building a moat rivals can’t simply buy; and we’re seeing the same pattern play out in robotics. Listen to the audio version of this article (generated by AI).

In late 2005, Amazon (AMZN) launched a website without fanfare with a strange name and an even stranger pitch. Jeff Bezos called it “Mechanical Turk,” after an 18th-century chess-playing machine that toured Europe astonishing kings and philosophers who assumed they were losing to a clockwork mind. The trick, as it were, was a human chess master working the machine’s arms secretly from inside the cabinet.