Uber’s Gig Workers Now Include Coders for Hire on AI Projects
- Rideshare giant wants to help other businesses train AI models
- Company accepting signups from India, US, Canada and Poland
Uber is betting that it can help other businesses by getting enough skilled workers who can label images, text and videos with context for machine learning models.
Photographer: Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg
Uber Technologies Inc.’s gig-economy workforce now includes programmers. The company is expanding beyond its rideshare roots to enter a hot new market: helping other businesses outsource some of their artificial intelligence development to independent contractors.
Its new AI training and data labeling division, called Scaled Solutions, builds on an internal team that tackles large-scale annotation tasks for Uber’s rideshare, food delivery and freight units. According to its website, Scaled Solutions has begun serving other companies that also need high-quality datasets. Clients include Aurora Innovation Inc., an Uber-backed firm that makes self-driving software for commercial trucks, and Niantic Inc., the game developer behind Pokémon Go.