Hundreds of thousands of workers from Venezuela signed up to work for these companies last year, in some cases making up as much as 75% of a firm--s workforce. Even today, 75% of search traffic to Mighty AI comes from a site advertising jobs in Venezuela. The companies don--t pay more for data labeling than a platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk, but they do offer a steadier source of income, providing a measure of security for those in a country where inflation recently hit 10 million percent.

Data is the new oil

The tech giants already know this and are investing in democratizing AI to make tools and services more widely available, but the user experience (UX) of machine learning is still overlooked. Companies can make massive improvements to machine learning-based applications even without access to the same levels of data or talent as the biggest players -- compensating for a lack of data by building a great UI (more on this later). When we focus on AI as a tool and recognize how crucial usability is to widespread adoption, we can see that there are opportunities to enhance existing AI in ways that have nothing to do with progress toward human-level machine intelligence or artificial general intelligence. While flashy projects like DeepMind and Google Brain are more likely to make headlines than Google's more mundane implementations of AI, such as search, the latter is a vastly more profitable business. According to a recent MarketWatch article, Google has "made a massive multibillion-dollar bet on AI and machine learning," a bet I believe is nicely hedged on the question of whether there'll be another "AI winter," a period of reduced interest in AI.

SAN FRANCISCO: There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by hundreds of thousands of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework _drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into machine learning'' algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world _ even in the U.S.

There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by an army of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework -- drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world -- even in the U.S. And it underpins a technology that could change humanity forever: AI that will drive us around, execute verbal commands without flaw, and -- possibly -- one day think on its own.

There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by an army of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework -- drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world -- even in the U.S.

San Francisco - There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by an army of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework - drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world - even in the US.

There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by hundreds of thousands of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework -- drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world -- even in the US.

There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by an army of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework --drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on. These repetitive tasks pay pennies apiece. But in bulk, this work can offer a decent wage in many parts of the world -- even in the U.S.

This August 2017 photo provided by Shamima Khatoon shows Khatoon in New Delhi. Khatoon's job of annotating cars, lane markers and traffic lights at an all-female outpost of data-labeling company iMerit in Metiabruz, India, represents the only chance she has to work outside the home in a conservative Muslim region of India. This August 2017 photo provided by Shamima Khatoon shows Khatoon in New Delhi. SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- There's a dirty little secret about artificial intelligence: It's powered by an army of real people. From makeup artists in Venezuela to women in conservative parts of India, people around the world are doing the digital equivalent of needlework --drawing boxes around cars in street photos, tagging images, and transcribing snatches of speech that computers can't quite make out. Such data feeds directly into "machine learning" algorithms that help self-driving cars wind through traffic and let Alexa figure out that you want the lights on.