Amazon Is Closing the Marketplace Bezos Called 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence' — Because the Real Thing Showed Up

Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts · Aug 27, 2026 · 4m · transcript

Amazon posted a banner on the Mechanical Turk homepage saying the 21-year-old micro-task marketplace will permanently close on September 30, 2026. Launched in 2005 to farm out work computers could not do — labeling images, transcribing audio, filling out surveys — MTurk grew to more than 500,000 workers paid pennies a task. It is closing as AI absorbs the low end of that work and the money moves to credentialed expert annotators.

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