Now it’s China’s experts who are gig workers training AI

Squeezed by a stagnant economy and state directives, China’s underemployed lawyers, architects, and engineers are taking cheap gig work to teach AI their exact trades — just to pay this month’s mortgage.
  • Chinese tech giants are recruiting skilled professionals as specialized AI trainers to build high-quality data sets.
  • Facing economic downturns and layoffs, professionals take these challenging annotation gigs as supplementary income.
  • The efforts mirror U.S. platforms like Mercor and Handshake hiring domain experts to narrow the technological gap with Silicon Valley.
 

As a Shenzhen-based architect in her 40s, Cuicui has vast experience designing public stadiums, schools, and hospitals at an architecture firm. But over the past five years, declining government infrastructure spending caused a sharp drop in business. Her income halved. 

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