Far-Flung Postcards is a weekly sequence wherein NPR’s worldwide workforce shares snapshots of moments from their lives and work around the globe.
You won’t understand it, however all the pieces from AI chatbots and autonomous driving programs requires actually trillions of knowledge factors to coach. My colleague Emily Feng and I have been curious in regards to the individuals behind the scenes — these working in rooms like this one, who accumulate and type all that knowledge for AI purposes.
I took this picture earlier this month at a “knowledge processing heart” 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 making an attempt to reinvent themselves by attracting new tech, together with AI knowledge work.
The duties right here appeared extremely summary: employees spending hours drawing packing containers round shifting shapes and inexperienced dots on a display screen, and checking them in opposition to digital camera photographs 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 like backstage — younger employees quietly sorting via huge quantities of knowledge to energy the AI instruments an increasing number of of us use.
See extra photographs from around the globe:
- Greetings from Palmyra, Syria, with its once-grand lodge named for a warrior queen
- Greetings from Mexico Metropolis, the place these canines journey a bus to and from faculty
- Greetings from the Galápagos Islands, the place the blue-footed booby reveals its colours
- Greetings from Afrin, Syria, the place Kurds danced their hearts out to have a good time spring
- Greetings from Dharamshala, India, the place these Tibetan children have been having the most effective time
- Removed from the entrance strains, Ukrainians struggle a warfare to protect their tradition
- As Greenland prepares for tourism improve, a second of stillness
