Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down
- ID
- 17914
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 26 Aug 2026, 9:15 PM
- Fetched
- 26 Aug 2026, 9:35 PM
- Provider
- CNBC Technology
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/amazon-service-that-jeff-bezos-called-artificial-ai-is-shutting-down.html
- Source URL
- https://www.cnbc.com/id/19854910/device/rss/rss.html
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 26 Aug 2026, 9:36 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learnersai_agent_userssaas_startup_founders
What happened
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk (MTurk) on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year-old crowdsourcing platform that paid workers a few cents per task for jobs like data labeling, transcription, and survey responses. Bezos called it 'artificial artificial intelligence' because it farmed out tasks humans found trivial but computers couldn't do.
Why it matters
If your data-labeling or human-in-the-loop pipeline depends on MTurk, you have until Sept 30, 2026 to migrate to alternatives like Scale AI, Labelbox, Prolific, or Toloka. The shutdown also signals that Amazon sees modern AI models reducing demand for cheap human annotation at scale.
Discussion angle
What replaces MTurk for low-cost, high-volume human annotation—and does the shutdown reflect that LLMs now handle most of these tasks natively, or is there still a gap for human review that no current AI tool fills well?