Business Insider “ChatGPT can code and tutor. Now, contractors are helping the system to become ever more specialized in niche areas like animal husbandry, agriculture, music composition, and even commercial flying, documents show. Under Project Stagecraft, as it is internally known at data-labeling startup Handshake AI, freelancers are being paid at least $50 an hour to create materials that will be used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand various occupations, one contractor told Business Insider. Business Insider reviewed dozens of pages of documents for the project, including step-by-step instructions for contractors. In these files, contractors from various industries were directed to develop a persona and create tasks that reflect real work. The project, which has employed about 3,000 to 4,000 freelancers, is ongoing, the contractor said. San Francisco-based Handshake AI expanded from a job platform aimed at young professionals to the data-labeling industry. It’s part of a slew of startups that pay hundreds of thousands of contractors around the world to filter, rank, and train AI responses for the world’s largest tech companies. This data work helps improve everything from self-driving cars to OpenAI and Meta’s chatbots.
Under Project Stagecraft, as it is internally known at data-labeling startup Handshake AI, freelancers are being paid at least $50 an hour to create materials that will be used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT to understand various occupations, one contractor told Business Insider. Business Insider reviewed dozens of pages of documents for the project, including step-by-step instructions for contractors. In these files, contractors from various industries were directed to develop a persona and create tasks that reflect real work. The project, which has employed about 3,000 to 4,000 freelancers, is ongoing, the contractor said. San Francisco-based Handshake AI expanded from a job platform aimed at young professionals to the data-labeling industry. It’s part of a slew of startups that pay hundreds of thousands of contractors around the world to filter, rank, and train AI responses for the world’s largest tech companies. This data work helps improve everything from self-driving cars to OpenAI and Meta’s chatbots. As AI gets smarter and more capable, data-labeling platforms have shifted from generalist work to increasingly specialized tasks that require field expertise or postgraduate degrees. According to Handshake’s website, expert taskers can be paid up to $500 per hour for contract work in job listings that were not explicitly tied to OpenAI. A Handshake training guide for Stagecraft shared with contractors says that the focus is on “knowledge work, not manual labor.” The data collected would help “map economically relevant tasks and evaluate the model’s capabilities.”
