Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly collection during which NPR’s worldwide staff shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work world wide.
You may not notice it, however every thing from AI chatbots and autonomous driving techniques requires actually trillions of information factors to coach. My colleague Emily Feng and I have been curious concerning the folks behind the scenes — these working in rooms like this one, who accumulate and kind all that knowledge for AI functions.
I took this photograph earlier this month at a “knowledge processing middle” within the northern Chinese language metropolis of Shenyang. Cities like this have been as soon as depending on fading industries like steelmaking and coal. Now they’re making an attempt to reinvent themselves by attracting new tech, together with AI knowledge work.
The duties right here seemed extremely summary: staff spending hours drawing containers round transferring shapes and inexperienced dots on a display screen, and checking them in opposition to digital camera photographs to assist the AI perceive what it is seeing — like telling the distinction between an individual and a pole, or a parked automotive and one which’s transferring. It jogged my memory of the TV present Severance — which is sort of widespread in China too!
Even the middle’s supervisor admitted the work is fairly monotonous. However I suppose that is what innovation appears like backstage — younger staff quietly sorting via large quantities of information to energy the AI instruments an increasing number of of us use.
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