In a recent development, Google has ended a multimillion-dollar contract with an Australian company that helps train artificial intelligence using contractors across the globe.
Appen told the Australian Stock Exchange on 22nd Jan 24 that Google notified it on Saturday that it would be terminating its contract with Appen as of 19 March 2024 as part of a strategic review process.
Here is a link to the complete news.
Appen employs 1 million skilled contractors who speak more than 235 languages and are based in 170 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio, and other data to improve AI systems used by large tech companies such as Google and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labor involved in training systems people use every day. A major portion of the revenue of company is coming from Google. Appen shares were down 39% after the news. So nearly 50% of the contractors of Appen will be jobless.
Appen is the oldest firm working with Google as a vendor for AI projects. Previously it acquired Leap Force and Rater Labs in 2017 to become a company with the largest contractor base.
A spokesperson for Google said the decision to end the contract “was made as part of our ongoing effort to evaluate and adjust many of our supplier partnerships across Alphabet to ensure our vendor operations are as efficient as possible”.
This will also mark the end of the famous project Yukon, Shasta, and Arrow in Appen. However, the projects with other clients like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and others will continue unaffected.
Previously is ha been only Lionbridge and Appen have partnered with Google to train AI systems. Now Telus ( that acquired Lionbridge 2 years back) Weloalize and RWS provide remote Raters to train the AI systems of Google.
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