Amazon pulls the plug on Mechanical Turk, AI's original human engine
Two quiet endpoints in the AI supply chain surfaced overnight: the platform that once supplied the human intelligence behind machine learning is switching off, and one of China's breakout models is being retired by its own maker.
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30, closing the 21-year-old marketplace that once supplied the human labor behind early machine learning. The company announced the closure in a notice posted to the MTurk site Tuesday, saying it regularly evaluates its programs and decided to wind the service down following an assessment. Launched in 2005, the platform matched an army of remote workers with "Human Intelligence Tasks" — labeling data, transcribing audio, answering surveys, often for a few cents apiece. Jeff Bezos famously called it "artificial artificial intelligence," because it farmed out work that was easy for humans but beyond the computers of the day.
At its peak the service drew more than half a million workers, but it faded as purpose-built data-labeling startups like Scale AI and Mercor took over the market it invented. The final indignity came from inside: a 2023 academic study found up to 46% of "human" task completers on the platform were quietly using AI models to do the work. The circle closes neatly — a marketplace born because machines couldn't do these tasks dies because machines now do them faster, leaving the gig workers who powered two decades of dataset-building scrambling for new platforms.
Moonshot AI will retire Kimi K2.5 on August 31, pulling its first trillion-parameter multimodal model off the shelf less than eight months after launch. The mixture-of-experts model — 1 trillion total parameters, 32 billion active, a 256K-token context window — debuted in late January and helped cement Kimi's place among China's breakout open-weights families; the older moonshot-v1 series goes dark alongside it. Developers are being pointed to Kimi K3, Kimi 2.6, and the K2.7 coding variants, the line whose rapid rise we followed in Kimi K3 escapes testing sandbox as AI designs first novel viruses. An API sunset barely seven months after release shows how brutal the model treadmill has become: last cycle's frontier is this quarter's maintenance cost.
What to watch: where MTurk's remaining enterprise users land — insurers and travel companies still leaning on it are already hunting alternatives — and whether Moonshot marks K2.5's exit with an open-weights gesture that softens the blow.
Does the death of Mechanical Turk mark the moment AI finally outgrew its human scaffolding — or just proof that the people in the loop never got their share? Tell us in the comments.
