Agencies
In the early years, getting top AI models like ChatGPT or its rival Cohere to produce human-like responses required vast teams of low-cost workers helping models distinguish basic facts such as if an image was of a car or a carrot.
But more sophisticated updates to AI models in the fiercely competitive arena are now demanding a rapidly expanding network of human trainers who have specialized knowledge – from historians to scientists, some with doctorate degrees.
"A year ago, we could get away with hiring undergraduates, to just generally teach AI on how to improve,” said Cohere co-founder Ivan Zhang, talking about its internal human trainers.
"Now we have licensed physicians teaching the models how to behave in medical environments, or financial analysts or accountants.” For more training, Cohere, which was last valued at over $5 billion, works with a startup called Invisible Tech.
Cohere is one of the main rivals of OpenAI and specializes in AI for businesses.
The startup Invisible Tech employs thousands of trainers, working remotely, and has become one of the main partners of AI companies ranging from AI21 to Microsoft to train their AI models to reduce errors, known in the AI world as hallucinations.
"We have 5,000 people in over 100 countries around the world that are PhDs, Master’s degree holders and knowledge work specialists,” said Invisible founder Francis Pedraza.
Invisible pays as much as $40 per hour, depending on the location of the worker and the complexity of work.
Some companies such as Outlier pay up to $50 per hour, while another company called Labelbox said it pays up to $200 per hour for "high expertise” subjects like quantum physics, but starts with $15 for basic topics.
Invisible was founded in 2015 as a workflow automation company catering to the likes of food delivery company DoorDash to digitize their delivery menu.
But things changed when a relatively unknown research firm called OpenAI contacted them in the spring of 2022, ahead of the public launch of ChatGPT.
"OpenAI came to us with a problem, which is that when you were asking an early version of ChatGPT a question, it was going to hallucinate. You couldn’t trust the answer,” Pedraza told Reuters.
"They needed an advanced AI training partner to provide reinforcement learning with human feedback.” OpenAI did not respond to request for comment. Generative AI produces new content based on past data used to train it.