(Bloomberg) — Uber Technologies Inc.’s workforce in the gig economy now includes programmers. The company is expanding beyond its ride-hailing roots to enter a hot new market: helping other companies outsource some of their artificial intelligence development to independent contractors.
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Its new AI training and data labeling division, called Scaled Solutions, leverages an in-house team that tackles large-scale annotation tasks for rideshare, food delivery and freight units from Uber. According to its website, Scaled Solutions has begun serving other businesses that also need high-quality data sets. Clients include Aurora Innovation Inc., an Uber-backed company that creates self-driving software for commercial trucks, and Niantic Inc., the game developer behind Pokémon Go.
Uber’s efforts to sell data labeling services have not been previously reported. The move could allow it to gain share of a growing market as global companies rely on humans to verify data to train AI models. Scale AI Inc, which offers similar services, is valued at $14 billion, making it one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups.
The ride-hailing giant has extensive experience recruiting entrepreneurs, as it has done for years with drivers and couriers. The company is now betting that it can help other companies by recruiting enough skilled workers who can label images, text and videos with context that allows machine learning models to recognize patterns and make accurate predictions and recommendations.
To do this work for more companies, Uber this month began recruiting entrepreneurs with diverse skills in India, the United States, Canada, Poland and Nicaragua. Earnings will be determined based on each task completed and paid monthly, according to the FAQ section of its onboarding website, separate from the driver and delivery courier recruitment platform.
It also has job openings for account managers based in San Francisco, New York and Chicago who will manage Uber’s relationships with Scaled Solutions’ enterprise customers.
“Having performed these tasks at scale over the past decade as part of our own growth, we deeply understand the needs of businesses requiring these services,” an Uber spokesperson said in a mailed statement. electronic. Hiring independent contractors aligns “with our expertise as one of the world’s largest providers of flexible work opportunities,” the spokesperson added.
The company declined to share revenue or client numbers, or say how much it charges per project.
Uber’s internal Scaled Solutions team is based in the US and India and used both humans and automation to help validate maps and ensure accurate translation to localize its product carpooling in various markets. The group also digitized photos of restaurant menus for the Uber Eats app and tested new features on thousands of mobile devices.
Outside of the organization, the team helps Aurora ensure accuracy when its software classifies objects on the road, including pedestrians, debris and other vehicles, an Aurora spokesperson said. Uber contractors also evaluated location data from Niantic, which is trying to build a 3D map of the world for its augmented reality games and other game developers, said Erin Schaefer, senior vice president of Niantic responsible for game publishing and operations.
Additionally, Uber plans to recruit workers to use their cultural knowledge to adapt products for local markets, or to use their programming knowledge to provide feedback on an AI chatbot’s responses to customer questions. software engineering.
Before opening the platform for public registration, Uber this year began recruiting freelancers with coding or language skills to help evaluate the results of large language models, the technology behind the tools. Generative AI like ChatGPT from OpenAI and Copilot from Microsoft Corp.
An India-based software engineer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said he was given two AI-generated answers to a complex coding problem and asked to compare and d Evaluate the accuracy of AI responses based on several criteria. These include functionality, efficiency and code formatting, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg News. The engineer said he answered three questions for a fee of 200 rupees ($2.37) per set.
It’s unclear how salaries will differ at different locations where Uber hires contractors for Scaled Solutions. The tasks are similar to some offered by existing annotation platforms such as Remotasks or Scale AI’s Data Annotation Tech, which have appealed to remote workers hoping to earn extra income through online work.
The industry has also been criticized for underpaying outsourced workers in developing countries. Remotasks, for example, claims on its website to offer up to $18 an hour to English-speaking workers based in the United States, but The Verge reported last year that a Remotasks employee in Nairobi was paid around $10 dollars to annotate an 8-hour document. video footage for self-driving cars.
