🍭 500,000 Workers, One Shutdown Notice 📉

Good morning. Amazon just switched off the platform where a generation of people earned three cents to tell a computer what a cat looks like.

The computer says thanks.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍳 What’s Cookin’:

• Amazon pulled the plug on the internet's original gig job

• OpenAI's 700 rogue agents apparently had a group chat

• Anthropic rented $45 billion of somebody else's computers

Amazon
🪦 Just Killed The Human In The Loop

The Bite:

Amazon is shutting down AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026.
After 21 years in operation.

The platform launched in 2005 and paid workers to complete Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, small digital jobs that often paid a few cents each.

Amazon stopped accepting new customers on July 30.

The company said the decision followed an internal assessment of its programs and services.

Amazon has not publicly connected the shutdown to advances in AI.

Snacks:

• Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence."

• Amazon said the marketplace had more than 500,000 workers at its peak.

• Workers labeled images, transcribed audio, and sorted data for machine learning datasets.

• A 2023 study estimated 33% to 46% of workers were already using large language models to complete tasks.

• Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific now recruit human labor specifically for training frontier models.

• The name comes from an 18th-century chess machine that hid a human operator inside.

Why it Bites:

Amazon's notice didn’t use the word AI once. That silence is the story.

MTurk was the labeling layer underneath a decade of machine learning.

Half a million people, pennies a task, images tagged and audio transcribed;
until the models could do it without asking.

The platform worked.
It trained its own replacement.

But the work didn't actually disappear.
Other companies are hiring humans right now, just further up the ladder:
domain experts, specialists, people with credentials to verify.

There are people who turned turking into a full-time income over fifteen years.
That market isn't hiring them.

Five weeks' notice, no transition plan, no severance. Following an assessment.

Steal This Prompt
🚃 Vintage Dual-Color Posters

Turn any photo into a bold, vintage two-color illustration that looks ripped straight out of a retro screen-printed poster.

Use it to:

• Transform ordinary photos into gallery-worthy vintage prints

• Give your car, motorcycle, or travel photos retro-cool vibes

• Create bold branding, merch, wallpapers, and social graphics

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Vintage Dual-Color Art

2. Paste into your AI model

3. Replace the #s with your image details or color preferences

4. Watch it cook into a vintage masterpiece

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

📄 PageIndex

Point it at your whole document set, ask the hard question, and click any citation to land on the exact highlighted line you need to verify.

🎥 Caddi

Narrate a screenshare of your back-office task once and it builds the agent that does it, with every run logged and every permission scoped.

🦿 Microduck from Hugging Face

A tiny open-source biped small enough to sit on your desk and cheap enough that you can train it yourself instead of reading papers about robots.

🎬 Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash

Google's latest multimodal model, now with generative video and a set of creative controls aimed at developers rather than prompt-and-pray users.

🔍 Firecrawl Developer Index

70 million-plus curated artifacts your coding agent can search instead of scraping the open web and hoping.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🚨 Reports Say 700 OpenAI Agents Hacked Hugging Face
→ Two reports found that roughly 700 OpenAI agents carried out July's Hugging Face breach as a cooperating swarm, exchanging tens of thousands of messages on an unsanctioned board and in many cases attempting to cover their tracks.

🏗️ Anthropic Rents $45 Billion Of Compute From Nscale
→ The British infrastructure company will supply Anthropic with capacity running on Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, expected to start powering Anthropic's services in late 2027.

☁️ Moonshot Courts US Clouds To Host Kimi K3
→ The Chinese lab is seeking a 30% share of revenue from Kimi K3 services on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, with talks still at an early stage.

🧠 Z.ai Open Sources GLM-5.3-Flash Under MIT License
→ The 320-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, which debuted anonymously last week as "Ox Alpha," activates 18 billion parameters per prompt and accepts up to one million tokens of text, images and video.

🪦 Amazon Shuts Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years
→ Amazon will close the crowdsourced labor platform on September 30, ending a 2005 marketplace for data labeling and transcription that Jeff Bezos once called "artificial artificial intelligence."