The human labor behind artificial intelligence - Marketplace

In the priciest office block in the central province of Henan's Luoyang city, some two-dozen people stare at blurry street photos on their computer screens, carefully drawing squares around vehicles and pedestrians. Purple for bikes, green for humans, baby blue for three-wheelers," said employee Liu Yajing of the data labeling firm Intellect Growth Technology. Her work is part of an autonomous vehicle project. The data labels will help train a driverless car to identify and avoid hitting other vehicles or humans. Liu opens the next fuzzy photo of the same street corner, taken from a different angle. She highlights a car, a bike and a pedestrian. Data labeling is repetitive work, but it's the starting point for most artificial intelligence applications. China's state council issued plans for the country to be a leader in AI by 2030, which includes preferential policies and tax breaks for local firms. Ding Yijun said his path to become one of the investors in the data labeling firm was sheer luck. "Some people in online chat groups said we could earn some extra money [data labeling]," Ding said. The people identified themselves as contractors of the Chinese tech giant Baidu, which was a claim Ding and his friends thought could be a scam since they were in a third-tier city like Luoyang. Still, they took a leap of faith and accepted some freelance projects. "The business at first was based on trust.