Stage 1 · Lesson 5 of 6
Who pays for the work
Your work usually passes through a chain. At the top are AI labs and companies building models. They hire , companies such as Scale AI, Appen, TELUS Digital, Toloka, Labelbox and Turing, to supply data.
Vendors find workers through their own contributor platforms (Outlier for Scale, for Appen, for Toloka, Alignerr for Labelbox) or through employment and outsourcing firms, including in-office annotation centres in South Asia and Africa.
Some businesses also hire directly on Upwork. Knowing the chain explains a lot: why a project can stop overnight when a client changes plans, why you sign , and why the platform, not the lab, is the one that pays you.
Common traptrusting any "agent" who claims to sit between you and a platform. Real platforms recruit directly.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- CoursePaidGrokking Modern AI Fundamentals
Design Gurus · Beginner · $72 one-time
A structured course on how modern AI models are built and trained, for the full picture behind your tasks
- VideoFreeDeep Dive into Large Language Models like ChatGPT
Andrej Karpathy · Intermediate
Free: Karpathy walks through pre-training, fine-tuning and RLHF, including the role of human labellers