Amazon Is Winding Down Mechanical Turk, Its 2005 Human-Labor Marketplace

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the long-running marketplace that paid people to handle small tasks computers struggled with, according to CNBC.

The service launched in 2005 with a simple premise: some jobs are trivial for a person and hard for a machine. Businesses posted those jobs, and a distributed pool of workers completed them for small payments. Jeff Bezos memorably called the arrangement "artificial artificial intelligence" — software-like output delivered by humans behind the interface.

That framing looks like a period piece now. Mechanical Turk arrived years before the current generation of machine learning systems, at a time when routine chores like sorting images or cleaning up messy records still needed human eyes. The platform also became a fixture in academic research, where it offered a cheap way to recruit survey participants at scale.

Its closure marks the end of one of Amazon's more unusual side projects, a business that sat outside the company's retail and cloud engines but ran for roughly two decades. Amazon has not detailed a wind-down timeline in the reporting.

For the crowdworkers who used the site to piece together income, the shutdown removes a source of small, flexible jobs. For everyone else, it is a reminder of how much of early AI infrastructure was built on human labor that was never especially visible.