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Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

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These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding, “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is very much on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence.

In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor, and it even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. 

Beginning in 2018, Amazon also began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden enabler for companies taking a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as Ai are actually being performed by the Mechanical Turk workforce — all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models grew even more complicated. In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and also about whether humans needed to be in the loop at all.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, one Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted, “Someone at Amazon is going to decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.”

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Ogunbayo Joins Smart City Technical Committee Ahead Of New NNL Season

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Abiodun Ogunbayo has been appointed as a member of the Smart City Football Club Technical Committee for the 2026/27 football season, as the Lagos-based club strengthens its technical structure ahead of the new Nigeria National League campaign.

The appointment, which takes immediate effect, places Ogunbayo in an advisory and performance-monitoring role, working alongside the Head Coach and technical crew to support the club’s technical objectives.

Read Also: From A Goalkeeper To Femmco’s Left-Back: How Ajisola Rereloluwa Turned Doubt Into Determination

According to the appointment letter signed by the club’s Chief Operating Officer, Betiku Seun, Ogunbayo will be involved in monitoring and evaluating player performances during training sessions and competitive matches.

He will also assess the players’ technical, tactical and physical performances, while providing constructive recommendations to the technical crew.

His responsibilities will further include conducting pre-match and post-match analysis, identifying strengths, weaknesses and areas requiring improvement, as well as supporting player development by identifying individual talents and specific coaching needs.

The committee will also recommend appropriate technical, tactical and developmental interventions where necessary.

Smart City stressed that the Technical Committee will operate strictly in an advisory and performance-monitoring capacity, working collaboratively with the Head Coach and technical crew without undermining their operational authority.

Ogunbayo is expected to bring his knowledge and experience to the assignment as the club continues preparations for the 2026/27 season.

With his background also extending into sports journalism, his knowledge of football communication could potentially prove useful to the club’s media activities. However, his official appointment at this stage is strictly as a member of the Technical Committee, according to the letter.

The appointment represents another step in Smart City’s preparations for the new NNL campaign, with the club looking to strengthen its technical processes, improve player development and raise its competitive standards.

For Ogunbayo, the immediate task is clear: observe, analyse, advise and contribute to the technical growth of Smart City FC throughout the new season.

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‘I don’t regret it’ – Aisha Yesufu reveals why she voted APC in 2015

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A chieftain of the Nigerian Democratic Congress, NDC, Aisha Yesufu, has said she does not regret her choice of presidential candidate in the 2015 election, revealing that she voted for the All Progressives Congress, APC, because of the party’s choice of Yemi Osinbajo as its vice presidential candidate.

Aisha, who spoke in a recent interview with Kaa Truth podcast, said she didn’t vote for the APC because of former president, Muhammadu Buhari.

According to her, her decision to vote for the APC in 2015 was influenced by reports that Buhari would delegate some key responsibilities, particularly the management of the country’s economy, to Osinbajo’s office.

She said, “I don’t regret voting for Buhari. This is the thing, if I’m to regret voting for Buhari, it will be like this disaster we have now, we should allow it because the next person will be worse.

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“It was Jonathan that made Buhari to be acceptable by the people. We had someone who had done so badly and by 2015, we voted for APC. I didn’t vote for that ticket for Buhari but because of Pastor Yemi Osibanjo.

“If you ask me why, I will say because Buhari is known to delegate his duties. When he was a military head of state, it was Tunde Idiagbon that was in charge. They said Osibanjo was going to be in charge of the economy.”

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