In February, New York journalist Emily Friedlander received a message on LinkedIn advertising a new job where she could “earn up to $40 an hour ($1,600 a week) teaching AI models how to write.”
The job was at Outlier AI, a relative unknown in the vibrant field of generative AI, but with nearly 5,000 job listings on Glassdoor, the company seemed to be on the move.
Over the next few weeks, Friedlander received three more recruiting messages on LinkedIn from Outlier. Friedlander explained that the pitches appeared to be automated, with a “sponsored” tag sandwiched between the sender's name and the body of the message. Each message offered a different salary amount: first $21 an hour, then $40 an hour, then back down to $25 an hour.
“It felt kind of predatory,” Friedlander said. “It was a time of media layoffs and obviously not a lot of work, so I could understand why someone in a tight spot would be fooled.”
Three of the four messages were sent by “growth leaders” at Scale AI, a Silicon Valley unicorn that provides data labeling services to some of the largest generative AI startups, including OpenAI.
Scale AI raised $1 billion last month from venture capital giants Founders Fund, Y Combinator and others, cementing its valuation at $14 billion and earning its 27-year-old CEO, Alexander Wang, the title of the world's youngest self-made billionaire.
Friedlander considers himself lucky that he didn't take up the offer. Online, voices have been circulating on networking sites like LinkedIn, YouTube videos and platforms like X and Reddit warning of a possible “scam” perpetrated by Outlier.
The Outlier AI group on Reddit has 3,600 members, many of whom regularly post about their experiences tagging and annotating the company's hourly wage data. Members describe difficulties getting paid, a tedious onboarding process that takes days, and a general sense of uncertainty about Outlier's legitimacy.
The Outlier subreddit said workers were doing similar work for Scale AI subsidiary Remotasks, which employs thousands of gig workers in the Philippines and Africa who tag photos and text to improve large-scale language models developed by OpenAI and other partners, eventually making them suitable for public consumption.
As companies struggle with the exorbitant costs of building LLMs, many have turned to cheaper human labor (often overseas) to refine the models so that chatbots don’t speak gibberish or hallucinate randomly. In the machine learning field, this technique is known as “reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF).”
Various media outlets, including The Washington Post, The Verge, and Rest of the World, reported last year that gig workers in developing countries faced challenges when working for remote tasks, including not being paid on time or at all.
Last September, Scale AI released a statement addressing unpaid claims for workers through Remotasks: “Remotasks is our global platform designed for flexible, gig-based data annotation work. It was established as an independent platform to protect customer confidentiality,” the statement said.
Outlier is recruiting new employees for Scale AI's RLHF business, and its website lists numerous job openings for workers whose native languages include Spanish, Greek, Lithuanian, Punjabi and Thai.
However, there is no publicly available information about Outlier AI's management or addresses on the company's website, LinkedIn profile or Instagram account. Public records databases are similarly lacking.
Both Fortune and The New York Times reports state that Outlier is a subsidiary of Scale AI, and The Washington Post reports that in 2019, Scale AI created a company called Smart Ecosystem Philippines to operate Remotasks in the country. Outlier AI's privacy policy states: “References to 'Outlier,' 'we,' or 'our' refer to Smart Ecosystem, Inc. and its affiliates, including Smart Ecosystem Philippines, Inc..”
Scale AI did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Co., Ltd. But a tech company CEO named Sean Burns might be able to provide some more details about the current state of Outlier AI.
In 2015, Burns founded another business intelligence platform called Outlier AI. The company never partnered with Scale AI while he led it, and it eventually disbanded in 2022, with its staff acquired by Seattle-based retail data platform SoundCommerce. At the time Burns was posting a farewell message to the original Outlier AI on LinkedIn, its remaining assets were being sold to an unknown buyer by business advisory firm Sherwood Partners, Burns explains.
Sherwood Partners did not respond to a phone request for comment, and even Burns could not say whether Outlier AI's current owners were behind its asset purchase.
But because of his connection to the original Outlier AI, Burns and his former staff regularly receive angry messages accusing the current company of not paying them for their work. (It doesn't help that LinkedIn continues to cross-post current Outlier AI job listings on a page it keeps for Burns' former company, according to Burns.)
“I am writing to address urgent concerns regarding suspended accounts and payment discrepancies,” a message sent to Burns from a freelancer in April read.
In another message to Burns in May, a worker wrote: “This is making it difficult for me to pay my bills and is causing great inconvenience to my family and children.”
An additional message reads, “I applied to one of the jobs and was invited to continue onboarding, but when I tried to find out more about the company's current situation I began to feel uneasy and uncertain about its authenticity.”
Barnes says Co., Ltd.He said he started receiving these messages last year, but the volume has skyrocketed in recent months.
“They came in one after the other and were very specific,” he explains. “They talked about going through a training program, an assessment testing program, and they expected to be paid for it. [and] “You don't get paid for that,” he says.
For now, Burns is caught in the middle of an embarrassing fiasco that he can't do much about. He says he hasn't tried to forward the messages to Sherwood, who was his only contact with the buyer, because they were obligated to sell the company and nothing more.
“Several [the messages] “That's very insulting, I know,” he says. Co., Ltd. “They're angry. It's just a shame.”
