The office of Jun Peng Technology company’s office is a rented traditional courtyard home, found in China’s rural areas. These homes are large and two or three stories tall, unlike the ubiquitous apartment towers seen across China. Behind the house, a man is raking dead leaves on a plot of land that Zhou said is still used for crops.

MINQUAN, CHINA—Zhou Junkai’s office sits on the edge of Dongsha river, a staid body of water that divides the old and new sections of Minquan, a town of 318,000 in central China’s Henan province. It is here that Zhou, 19, founded his small shop of data labelers along with his 26-year old cousin this summer.

Inside, the only warm room is the office, where a dozen young people sit in front of wide, glowing screens. The screens and the fluorescent lights do little to brighten the room on a November day where the pollution levels have blocked the sun with a dense smoggy haze.

Zhou Junkai, right, and his cousin, Chen Rui, stand outside the gate of their office. Image: Author

Artificial intelligence requires large amounts of data to learn and discern patterns, whether those are pictures, audio or text as they interpret media differently from humans. To teach the algorithms how to accurately recognize an apple is an apple, it needs thousands to millions of pictures of apples. Further, it’s easily fooled. In one experiment, security researchers found that by distorting a picture of a school bus, although the change was invisible to the human eye, the artificial intelligence system could no longer recognize that it was a school bus.

The young people are “data labelers,” people who sit in front of computers for eight hours a day and click on dozens of photos, outlining backgrounds, foregrounds, and specific objects, all according to the specifications of a client who is working on artificial intelligence. Some may label medical scans; others, photos of landscapes and trees; and still others, pictures of the road for a driverless vehicle. This is the data given to artificial intelligence algorithms to learn to “see.” The artificial intelligence industry relies on this cheap, human labor as algorithms and “machine learning” are in many cases trained by real people.

But in an echo of the manufacturing factories that pushed China’s economic development in the 2000s, the country has also found itself home to a growing side industry of labor-intensive data labeling companies, which supply and process the massive amounts of data for the algorithms to consume. Aside from a few established large firms in China’s biggest cities, these companies are mainly growing in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas.

AI is also one of the ten key industries outlined in Made in China 2025, an economic master plan that the government is pushing to take the country from a mass manufacturing, low-value economy to a high technology, high-value one. China is now home to Sensetime, the world’s most valuable AI company, which focuses on facial and image recognition and works with local governments across the country on surveillance. It’s worth an estimated $4.5 billion, according to research firm CB Insights .

Last year, venture capitalists poured $5 billion into AI startups in China, which raised more money in the sector than the United States for the first time, according to consultancy AIB research. The Chinese government has made the field a priority, announcing an ambitious policy the same summer to construct an industry worth $150 billion by 2030 .

Money is flowing into China’s artificial intelligence industry, and few places illustrate that better than Henan. In a province that just a few years ago was known for its Foxconn plant (which makes Apple products) and electronics factories, its towns now boast offices of workers who are doing the laborious input work that makes computers smart.

Zhou landed in the industry after graduating as a mechanic from trade school and had been searching for something to do. The possibilities were finite.

Zhou had the idea of setting up shop after seeing a number of similar outfits in the town of Pingding Shan, a few hours west. Together, the cousins pooled together their family’s years of savings ($45,000) to buy a few dozen computers and rent an office space. They are, as far as they know, the only ones in Minquan.

Zhou Junkai, 19, is from a village outside Minquan. He said there weren’t many good job options for him after he graduated from trade school. Image: Author

“If you don’t know what you’ll do in the future, you can either go to a big city, and be a white-collar worker and then everyday you’re squeezed onto public transport,” he said. “As for other [fields], if you want to be No. 1, you need a lot of knowledge, experience, and education. These are things we don’t have.”

It was difficult to find a job as a car mechanic, he said. He worked in a factory briefly and then quit. Those shifts were grueling—14 hour days.

“I thought I couldn't stand it anymore,” he said. But “this industry felt like it had potential.”

Many are flocking to the data labeling industry now, said Han Jinhao, who started his data labeling company a little more than a year ago in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province. His company, Dianwokeji, employs more than 100 data labelers.

“Even though labeling is rather low-level work, the barrier to entry is relatively low, and it is still the AI industry,” he said. “So we thought if we can start from here, we can slowly, step by step, move towards something more high-value.”

Han counts more than 6,000 data labeling outfits that have registered on a Craigslist-like platform he built, where smaller outfits can find outsourcing gigs and hire new employees.