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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   36243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I don't have strong reasons to either believe or doubt DeepSeek. On the other hand I do not remotely trust the CEO of Scale AI, a company whose entire business model is empty hype and labor theft. Speaking as an engineer at an early AI startup, there is nobody in this startup bubble cycle who has benefited more from the 'Actually Indians' kind of AI than Wang.

Can you give a quick summary of what ScaleAI does and why it’s empty hype/labor theft? Googling them I just get a bunch of typical AI hype. Are they accused of hiring humans to pose as their AI agent or something?

As others have mentioned their primary business if having third worlders label training data while talking big about pushing the frontier of AI. However they are also more than happy to exploit CS undergrads (who accept 'internships' to do what I assume amounts to little more than quality checking the third worlders) and PhDs across the world during the recent involvement in the "Humanity's Last Exam" AI eval set (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42807803).

We were hiring for a few positions recently and were surprised by the number of extremely low quality candidates that had Scale on their resume (either from the mentioned internships or people caught by their recent layoff), to the point where we started instantly binning them.

They provide human generated data for other companies to train on, which is generally hard and expensive.

In theory, at least. In practice, at best you get a bunch of data from low wage Filipinos. At worst, you get data generated by existing models and laundered through the workers trying to hit quota.

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