AI COMPANIES UPGRADE WORKFORCE TO TRAIN SMARTER MODELS
The AI industry is undergoing a strategic shiftโcheap, repetitive data labeling jobs are being phased out in favor of skilled, higher-paid professionals to train more intelligent models.
Previously, workers in countries like Kenya and the Philippines handled basic annotation tasks. Now, as companies develop reasoning-capable AI systems like OpenAIโs o3 and Googleโs Gemini 2.5, thereโs a growing demand for domain experts in biology, finance, and more.
๐ Scale AI, Turing AI, and Toloka are leading the charge.
๐น Meta invested $15B in Scale AI, raising its valuation to $29B.
๐น Turing AI raised $111M in March, now valued at $2.2B.
๐น Toloka secured $72M in a round led by Bezos Expeditions.
โThe AI industry was for a long time heavily focused on the models and compute. Finally, it is accepting the importance of the data for training.โ โ Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka
Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth emphasized that complex tasks need real human input and insight into how AI models break down under pressure. His company now pays experts 20โ30% more than their current salaries, showing that high-quality data is worth the premium.
Meanwhile, human oversight is expanding. More quality assurance workers now review AI-generated content, especially in local languages and culturally nuanced contexts. AI models are being trained to solve problems step-by-stepโa method only possible with expert-driven โchain-of-thoughtโ demonstrations.
The future of AI wonโt just rely on bigger modelsโit will be built by smarter data, curated by smarter people.
#AI #MachineLearning #DataLabeling #OpenAI #ScaleAI