DoorDash launches a new ‘Tasks’ app that pays couriers to submit videos to train AI

Editor's take

DoorDash is piloting a new application for its delivery workforce, enabling couriers to earn supplementary income by capturing video footage of various activities, from mundane tasks to multilingual speech samples.

This initiative offers a novel approach to data acquisition for AI training, potentially lowering costs for companies needing diverse datasets and providing couriers with a flexible earning stream beyond deliveries. It taps into the gig economy's existing infrastructure to address a critical bottleneck in AI development: the creation of high-quality, real-world training data.

Future developments will reveal the scale of courier participation and the specific AI models or companies benefiting from this crowdsourced data. Key questions remain regarding data privacy, the quality and utility of the collected footage, and whether this model can be sustained and expanded beyond its initial testing phase.