The next AI gold rush is your laundry pile

TL;DR: After going to town scraping the internet for the last decade, AI companies have now pivoted to paying people for the data from their very real, sometimes boring lives. You know what they say: One person’s dirty laundry pile is another’s data gold mine.

What happened: Last week, Shift, an app from German AI-training company MicroAGI, launched in New York, promising a free apartment-cleaning service in exchange for letting the company record the cleaning and use the footage to train household robots. The launch video went predictably viral, and showed Shift cleaners wearing mounted cameras on their heads that film everything from loading laundry to scrubbing stains off a pan. Shift says it will teach “the next generation of robots how to help,” and plans to expand into services like repairs and errands. It also says it’s already paid tens of thousands of people in 15 countries.

Too many cooks in the kitchen: You’ve probably heard about the white-collar employees training AI that may eventually replace them. Shift is one of many companies paying people to record real-world, mundane tasks so machines can learn from them. DoorDash Tasks pays workers to collect data and videos. A company called Kled pays users for videos and camera-roll uploads, and another called Waffle Video will give you a few bucks to film specific actions like pouring liquids, tying shoes, and handling objects. After all, the robots aren’t going to learn how to clean a kitchen, fold laundry, or take a good selfie from Reddit posts…

Why this matters: Robotics companies can’t rely on scraped internet data the same way language models can. So, now they’re all rushing to get real-world training data. And while these startups are making waves because the concept feels futuristic and dystopian (and just plain silly), they also reveal a data gap that tech companies want to close. (Related: Nvidia just announced Cosmos 3, its model for training physical AI systems to do real-world tasks.)

The fine print: People already feel economically squeezed right now, and the gig economy has long been criticized for how it treats labor. While these businesses market themselves as new financial opportunities for people, the payouts say something different. A reporter from Wired who tested several platforms made a whopping… $21.55 for a week of forehead-camera life. Meanwhile, Kled says some top contributors can earn more, including a truck driver the company says makes up to $8,000 a month filming potholes. But those stories are not the norm, and these companies aren’t actually providing a lucrative side hustle.

Bottom line: This is just the start of AI data collection diving deeper into our everyday life, private spaces, and ordinary work. —AC