Amazon Retires Crowdsourced Work Platform Mechanical Turk After 21 Years
Amazon is set to shut down Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced work platform that has been operational for 21 years. The service was launched in 2005 to connect businesses with people who could complete small online tasks that computers struggled to handle.
The tasks included data labeling, transcription, and surveys, with payments often made on a per-task basis. Mechanical Turk later became part of Amazon Web Services' (AWS) offerings for human review and data annotation, including support for artificial intelligence development.
According to Amazon, the platform once counted over 500,000 workers. However, with advancements in AI capabilities and competing data-labeling platforms expanding, Amazon has decided to retire Mechanical Turk on September 30.