The Unexpected Connection Between ChatGPT, Mechanical Turk & NSI (Net Shepherd)

The development of modern AI systems like ChatGPT was built on foundational work in machine learning, which required huge datasets labeled by thousands of human reviewers in the early 2000s. This massive effort was largely made possible with the help of Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which provides a low-cost way to have a large community of people perform work over the Internet.

Mechanical Turk is a service that infringes upon my 1999 patent titled "Method and system for distributing a work process over an information network." Unfortunately, by the time this patent was granted to NSI the company was no longer focused on using this technology and decided not to allocate funds to enforce the patent. (I was no longer involved with NSI at this point.) As a result, Mechanical Turk continues to operate using my patented process to this day.

Certainly an unexpected connection between my invention of Distributed Work, Mechanical Turk, and the development of ChatGPT.

This connection between distributed work systems and modern AI is explored in detail in How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom by Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica. The 15-minute read offers a fascinating look at how AI evolved from a "dead-end science" to the transformative technology we know today.