Uber has offered additional income to drivers from India: when there are no taxi orders, they can help train artificial intelligence.
The task is to label photos, decipher texts and receipts right in the Uber app. This initiative is already operating in 12 cities in India, including Delhi and Mumbai — as part of the Uber AI Solutions program, which provides data labeling services to companies in the field of artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and other technologies. Among the company’s clients are game developer Niantic, which has turned into an AI startup, and autonomous vehicle manufacturer Aurora.
“Uber AI Solutions is piloting the program in 12 cities across India and allows drivers to increase their earnings by performing digital tasks directly within the Uber app. Until now, in India and other countries, labeling, text classification, object counting, and receipt digitization have been performed by independent contractors,” says Megha Yethadka, Global Head of Uber AI Solutions.
Unfortunately, Uber did not specify how much money drivers can earn from labeling.
Data labeling is essentially the process of adding meaningful descriptions or tags to images, test data, or audio that AI can use to understand more context. For example, there is a database of thousands of photos of cars, bicycles, or pedestrians, while labelers manually sign what each object is.
“Traditional vendors, while slower and often more expensive, offer the assurance of skilled annotators, mature management systems, and long-standing audit processes that inspire confidence in regulated industries,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst and CEO of Greyhound Research. “Uber’s strength is its speed and neutrality at a time when buyers are wary of ties to suppliers owned by large tech companies, but the company still has to prove that a temporary workforce can deliver the same rigor.”
In fact, Uber’s additional “secret weapon” is its subject matter expertise. According to Mordor Intelligence, the automotive sector accounted for 23.34% of the data labeling market, thanks to the development of autonomous vehicles.
Source: Economic Times, Computer World
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