PINGDINGSHAN, China: In a village in central China's Henan province, amid barking dogs and wandering chickens, villagers gather along a dirt road to trade images of their faces for kettles, pots and tea cups.
"We are creating more data sets to serve more AI algorithm companies, so they can serve the development of artificial intelligence in China," said Liu, declining to disclose his clients.The boom in demand for data to train AI algorithms is feeding a new global industry that gathers information such as photos and videos, which are then labelled to tell the machines what they are seeing.
These include tech giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Tencent Holding Ltd, Baidu Inc as well as younger companies such as AI specialist SenseTime Group Ltd and speech recognition firm Iflytek Co Ltd. Others were labelling British documents from the 1800s for a Western online ancestry service, marking fields for dates, names and genders on birth and death certificates.