Uber’s Gig Workers Now Include Coders For Hire On AI Projects – Yurika.R

Uber Technologies Inc.’s gig-economy workforce now includes programmers. The company is expanding beyond its rideshare roots to enter a hot new market: helping other businesses outsource some of their artificial intelligence development to independent contractors.

Its new AI training and data labeling division, called Scaled Solutions, builds on an internal team that tackles large-scale annotation tasks for Uber’s rideshare, food delivery and freight units. According to its website, Scaled Solutions has begun serving other companies that also need high-quality datasets. Clients include Aurora Innovation Inc., an Uber-backed firm that makes self-driving software for commercial trucks, and Niantic Inc., the game developer behind Pokémon Go.

Uber’s efforts to sell data labeling services have not previously been reported. The move could allow it to gain a piece of a growing market, as global companies rely on humans to vet data to train AI models. Scale AI Inc, which offers similar services, is valued at $14 billion, making it one of the hottest artificial intelligence startups.

The rideshare giant has plenty of experience recruiting contractors, as it has done for years with drivers and couriers. Now the company is betting that it can help other businesses by getting enough skilled workers who can label images, text and videos with context for machine learning models to recognize patterns and make accurate predictions and recommendations.

To perform this work for more companies, Uber this month started signing up contractors with various skills in India, the US, Canada, Poland and Nicaragua. Earnings will be determined by each task they complete and paid out monthly, according to the FAQ section of its onboarding website, which is separate from the platform for recruiting drivers and delivery couriers.

It also has corporate job postings for San Francisco, New York and Chicago-based account executives who will manage Uber’s relationship with Scaled Solutions’ enterprise customers.