Can OP or founders comment?

But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?

My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket.

Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low.

My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.

Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses:

"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"

If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched...yet

Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers:

"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"

I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years.

Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right?

Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.

One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.

You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?