Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Why AI Still Needs Us? A conversation with Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Why AI Still Needs Us? A conversation with Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka
In this episode, I sit down with Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka, to explore what true human-AI co-agency looks like in practice. We talk about how the role of humans in AI systems has evolved from simple labeling tasks to expert judgment and co-execution with agents – and why this shift changes everything.
We get into:
- Why "humans as callable functions" is the wrong metaphor – and what to use instead
- What co-agency really means?
- Why some data tasks now take days, not seconds – and what that says about modern AI
- The biggest bottleneck in human-AI teamwork (and it’s not tech)
- The future of benchmarks, the limits of synthetic data, and why it is important to teach humans to distrust AI
- Why AI agents need humans to teach them when not to trust the plan
If you're building agentic systems or care about scalable human-AI workflows, this conversation is packed with hard-won perspective from someone who’s quietly powering some of the most advanced models in production. Olga brings a systems-level view that few others can – and we even nerd out about Foucault’s Pendulum, the power of text, and the underrated role of human judgment in the age of agents.
Did you like the episode? You know the drill:
📌 Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping real-world AI.
💬 Leave a comment if this resonated.
👍 Like it if you liked it.
🫶 Thank you for watching and sharing!
Guest:
Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka
📰 Want the transcript and edited version?
Subscribe to Turing Post https://www.turingpost.com/subscribe
Chapters
0:00 – Intro: Humans as Callable Functions?
0:33 – Evolving with ML: From Crowd Labeling to Experts
3:10 – The Rise of Deep Domain Tasks and Foundational Models
5:46 – The Next Phase: Agentic Systems and Complex Human Tasks
7:16 – What Is True Co-Agency?
9:00 – Task Planning: When AI Guides the Human
10:39 – The Critical Skill: Knowing When Not to Trust the Model
13:25 – Engineering Limitations vs. Judgment Gaps
15:19 – What Changed Post-ChatGPT?
18:04 – Role of Synthetic vs. Human Data
21:01 – Is Co-Agency a Path to AGI?
25:08 – How To Ensure Safe AI Deployment
27:04 – Benchmarks: Internal, Leaky, and Community-Led
28:59 – The Power of Text: Umberto Eco and AI
Turing Post is a newsletter about AI's past, present, and future. Publisher Ksenia Semenova explores how intelligent systems are built – and how they’re changing how we think, work, and live.
Sign up: Turing Post: https://www.turingpost.com
If you’d like to keep following
Olga and Toloka:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/omegorskaya/
https://x.com/TolokaAI
Ksenia and Turing Post:
https://x.com/TheTuringPost
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksenia-se
https://huggingface.co/Kseniase
View all episodes
By Turing PostIn this episode, I sit down with Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka, to explore what true human-AI co-agency looks like in practice. We talk about how the role of humans in AI systems has evolved from simple labeling tasks to expert judgment and co-execution with agents – and why this shift changes everything.
We get into:
- Why "humans as callable functions" is the wrong metaphor – and what to use instead
- What co-agency really means?
- Why some data tasks now take days, not seconds – and what that says about modern AI
- The biggest bottleneck in human-AI teamwork (and it’s not tech)
- The future of benchmarks, the limits of synthetic data, and why it is important to teach humans to distrust AI
- Why AI agents need humans to teach them when not to trust the plan
If you're building agentic systems or care about scalable human-AI workflows, this conversation is packed with hard-won perspective from someone who’s quietly powering some of the most advanced models in production. Olga brings a systems-level view that few others can – and we even nerd out about Foucault’s Pendulum, the power of text, and the underrated role of human judgment in the age of agents.
Did you like the episode? You know the drill:
📌 Subscribe for more conversations with the builders shaping real-world AI.
💬 Leave a comment if this resonated.
👍 Like it if you liked it.
🫶 Thank you for watching and sharing!
Guest:
Olga Megorskaya, CEO of Toloka
📰 Want the transcript and edited version?
Subscribe to Turing Post https://www.turingpost.com/subscribe
Chapters
0:00 – Intro: Humans as Callable Functions?
0:33 – Evolving with ML: From Crowd Labeling to Experts
3:10 – The Rise of Deep Domain Tasks and Foundational Models
5:46 – The Next Phase: Agentic Systems and Complex Human Tasks
7:16 – What Is True Co-Agency?
9:00 – Task Planning: When AI Guides the Human
10:39 – The Critical Skill: Knowing When Not to Trust the Model
13:25 – Engineering Limitations vs. Judgment Gaps
15:19 – What Changed Post-ChatGPT?
18:04 – Role of Synthetic vs. Human Data
21:01 – Is Co-Agency a Path to AGI?
25:08 – How To Ensure Safe AI Deployment
27:04 – Benchmarks: Internal, Leaky, and Community-Led
28:59 – The Power of Text: Umberto Eco and AI
Turing Post is a newsletter about AI's past, present, and future. Publisher Ksenia Semenova explores how intelligent systems are built – and how they’re changing how we think, work, and live.
Sign up: Turing Post: https://www.turingpost.com
If you’d like to keep following
Olga and Toloka:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/omegorskaya/
https://x.com/TolokaAI
Ksenia and Turing Post:
https://x.com/TheTuringPost
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksenia-se
https://huggingface.co/Kseniase