Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly collection through which NPR’s worldwide crew shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the globe.
You may not notice it, however all the things from AI chatbots and autonomous driving programs requires actually trillions of knowledge factors to coach. My colleague Emily Feng and I have been curious concerning the individuals behind the scenes — these working in rooms like this one, who accumulate and type all that information for AI functions.
I took this photograph earlier this month at a “information 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 attempting to reinvent themselves by attracting new tech, together with AI information work.
The duties right here seemed extremely summary: staff spending hours drawing containers round shifting shapes and inexperienced dots on a display, and checking them towards digital camera photos to assist the AI perceive what it is seeing — like telling the distinction between an individual and a pole, or a parked automobile and one which’s shifting. It jogged my memory of the TV present Severance — which is sort of in style in China too!
Even the middle’s supervisor admitted the work is fairly monotonous. However I suppose that is what innovation appears to be like like behind the scenes — younger staff quietly sorting via large quantities of knowledge to energy the AI instruments increasingly of us use.
See extra photographs from around the globe:
- Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with its once-grand resort named for a warrior queen
- Greetings from Mexico Metropolis, the place these canine experience a bus to and from faculty
- Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, the place the blue-footed booby exhibits its colours
- Greetings from Afrin, Syria, the place Kurds danced their hearts out to rejoice spring
- Greetings from Dharamshala, India, the place these Tibetan children have been having the perfect time
- Removed from the entrance strains, Ukrainians combat a battle to protect their tradition
- As Greenland prepares for tourism enhance, a second of stillness
