ОБ ЭТОМ ЭПИЗОДЕ
In 2018, on stage at Amazon's biggest conference, Mechanical Turk's product lead pitched "over 500,000 active workers." That same year, researchers measured how many people were actually working at any moment: about 2,000. The 500,000 was a registration count frozen since January 2011 — and Amazon's own documentation still advertised it the day the shutdown banner appeared. On September 30, 2026, the platform closes for good, and the obituaries all say AI killed it while Amazon exits human data. This episode reads the paperwork and finds both claims wrong.
What actually happened: MTurk was 1 of 10 SageMaker features cut the same day — a portfolio cleanup, not a reckoning. Ground Truth and Augmented AI are frozen, not closed, and Bedrock still sells AWS-managed human evaluators. Amazon isn't exiting human data; it's exiting a price point — the same move the whole industry made, from Surge's reported $1.2B to Mercor's $112-an-hour experts, with a $1.32-an-hour floor in Nairobi that never went away.
Also inside: the myth that needs retiring — crowds of Turkers did NOT train ChatGPT (OpenAI hired ~40 contractors and said so in writing), but roughly 80% of the original human-feedback data behind Claude traces to master-qualified Turkers, about 20 prolific workers — disclosed on air, since this show is made with Claude. The study that caught 33–46% of crowd workers using AI on the work meant to certify humanity (honestly bounded: one task, 46 summaries). The wage ledger: requesters paid $11.58 an hour; the median worker kept $1.77. And the shutdown's one mercy — every unreviewed task auto-approves, resolving the workers' oldest fight in their favor, posthumously. Two dated calls close it out, plus the practical note: worker transaction histories go dark January 28, 2027 — download yours before then.
CHAPTERS
00:00 The 500,000-worker trap
02:00 Two waves, ten cuts — the death certificate
03:12 Frozen, not closed: what actually survives
04:01 The industry moves upmarket
05:25 A dedup chore becomes a labor market
06:07 Vienna, 1770 — the original hoax
07:00 ImageNet's 50,000: the monument
08:03 The ChatGPT myth retires
08:38 Disclosure: the 20 Turkers inside Claude
09:50 The crowd replaces itself
11:30 The label breaks, not the models
12:12 The wage ledger
14:41 The people: Marshall to Pawloski
16:59 Every exit has a gate
18:01 The posthumous mercy
19:14 The second correction — and what to do
20:29 The ledger: two calls, one watch
21:15 The machine was people
SOURCES
mturk.com — closure banner + help pages (auto-approval, Jan 28 2027 data cutoff): https://www.mturk.com/
AWS SageMaker features — the ten-feature cutoff: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/ai/features/
AWS Ground Truth docs (maintenance mode; the "500,000" line): https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/sms.html
AWS Bedrock Evaluations (managed human evaluators): https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/evaluations/
Difallah, Filatova & Ipeirotis, WSDM '18 (~2,000 active): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3159652.3159661
Hara et al., CHI 2018 — the wage study: https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05796
ILO, Digital Labour Platforms (2018): https://www.ilo.org/publications/digital-labour-platforms-and-future-work-towards-decent-work-online-world
Veselovsky et al., EPFL 2023 — LLM use on MTurk: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07899
Bai et al. 2022 — Anthropic HH-RLHF (§2.1): https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05862
Stiennon et al. 2020 — "rather than using… Mechanical Turk": https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01325
Rest of World — the Remotasks precedent: https://restofworld.org/2024/scale-ai-remotasks-banned-workers/
CloudResearch — sunsetting the MTurk Toolkit: https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/blog/sunsetting-mturk-toolkit-cloudresearch/
US Patent 7,197,459 B1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7197459B1/en
