Adjust your gear. This is it.

>> Calibrating hands.

>> My new job. [music]

>> Recording started.

>> Training robots to do household tasks.

Oh, it's real nice pressure on my

forehead. Feels great. For the last few

weeks, I've been strapping this

extremely subtle contraption to my head.

[music]

>> Yeah, I know. I look really good.

>> Opening Micro AGI Shift app and

recording my chores with the promise of

earning up to $20 an hour. [music]

>> Picking up some very warm dog poop.

>> I don't want to talk about it.

>> And other companies all over the world

are doing the same kind of data [music]

collection. Also, we can teach the

robots to do the same things we can do.

>> How [music] much data here do you need?

>> At least like 20 million hours this

year.

>> It's all fun and games until you realize

some people are doing this for money to

help train the thing that could someday

replace [music] them. Let's talk about

it.

>> Day Shift is launching free [music]

house cleaning services in New York

City.

>> Okay, so when I spotted this ad for

Shift's free cleanings in New York, I

was excited to have these tech bros

clean my friend's apartment. The reality

looked a bit different.

>> Hi.

>> Good morning.

>> Good morning.

>> I'm Joanna.

>> Here's how this works. You get a free

apartment cleaning. Micro AGI, a German

startup, pays the cleaning crew a flat

rate. In exchange, the cleaners record

video of the entire cleaning, which

becomes training data for the robots.

>> So, we're going to press start and then

>> We're in.

>> Both cleaners wore Shift's signature

camera hats, which connect to Android

phones and record the entire cleaning

from a first-person perspective. For the

next 3 hours, the women meticulously

deep cleaned my friend's apartment while

I made a call to Micro AGI CEO to ask

what exactly was happening here.

>> I am in an apartment right now where we

have two Shift workers

and they are cleaning. What will you do

with the data they're collecting?

>> The data specifically that you are

collecting is used in pre-training of AI

models.

>> Translation, pre-training is when an AI

model learns general patterns from

analyzing massive unlabeled data sets.

In this case, lots of video of human

hands doing stuff. So, why do robots

need this? To learn. Factories and

warehouses are controlled environments.

You can design them around robots. Homes

are chaos. Take this Unitree robot we

met a few months ago.

It couldn't do anything autonomously in

my house. Or the 1X Neo I met last year

that struggled to load the dishwasher.

And that was with a human controlling it

through a VR headset. See, humanoid

robots have a data problem, a big one.

Large language models like ChatGPT have

been created by swallowing, well, pretty

much the entire internet. Robot models

need their own version of that. Massive

amounts of data showing the physical

world. Some call this egocentric data.

Micro AGI collects all those videos,

blurs any personally identifiable

details, anonymizes the videos, and AI

analyzes the hand movements. Finally,

all the accepted video is converted into

code that can be used for training. In

the case of what is happening here,

they're cleaning the sink and they're

cleaning the stove. Is this all to then

train a robot to be able to clean the

sink and clean the stove?

>> Um, not directly. Your footage that has

been recorded today is not necessarily

being taught to do, you know, sink

cleaning. It's only useful when you pair

it with millions of other diverse

examples where then a something called

generalization appears

and you can put it in anything.

>> The goal here is bigger than just

cleaning. It's a humanoid robot that

could walk into a house it's never seen

before, and just know how to do things.

At least, that's the dream. And that's

the dream that got me to wear this

thing. Not to mention the chance to make

hundreds of dollars doing chores I was

already going to be doing. But, well,

yeah, you'll see. My chin is sweating in

here.

>> Recording is still running.

>> Only 8% of what I have uploaded is

useful.

Ad break and money make time. Today, the

money make is sponsored by Mercury, our

launch partner here at The New Things,

and the main financial tool we use to

run the business. So, no, I didn't make

enough money training robots. But, the

bots are helping me manage our actual

money. Mercury has a new AI helper

called Command. So, now I can command

Command to do things related to the

business account, corporate cards, and

more. Pay David

back $15 for the sandwich

he bought me at lunch. Anything Command

wants to do, it asks for your approval

first. No AI is sending money without

you clicking confirm. Beyond Command, I

just love how simple Mercury is.

Managing accounts, corporate cards,

invoices, it's all in one clean

interface instead of digging through a

maze of banking menus. Link in the

description or go to mercury.com. Now,

back to training the robots.

>> Sometimes I like to talk to the robots.

Robots, if you're listening, you want to

really scrub the chocolate off the

table.

>> Shift doesn't just pay professionals. It

encourages regular people to contribute

data and pays individual contributors in

the US $20 for every hour of accepted

footage. Keyword, accepted. Unlike the

cleaning crews and other professional

services that use the hat, Shift has

individual contributors get this

contraption, inspired clearly by my

personal style icon, Wayne Szalinski

from Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

>> What's on your head?

>> I was looking for the kids.

>> So, for the last 3 weeks, I strapped it

to my head and recorded myself doing

chores around the house and even outside

the house. But, all I get are rejected.

Rejections, rejections, rejections.

Every uploaded clip is judged naturally

by AI on three things: camera quality,

hand visibility, and meaningful task.

Hand visibility was my downfall as the

app kept telling me hands were not

visible enough. But, when I reviewed the

footage, my hands were in frame. Turns

out it has to see both hands in frame

for a continuous period of time, which

explains why loading the dishwasher kept

getting rejected, while laundry and

cooking were approved. And Lord knows

why Skee-Ball got a check mark.

>> I can't aim with this thing in my face.

I suck.

>> But, here's the other big thing. Even

when your footage gets approved, you're

only paid for the portion they decide is

usable. Example, I recorded about 7

minutes of me folding laundry, but only

54% of it was usable. So, I only got

paid for the 3 and 1/2 usable minutes.

For the first week, Micro AG I was nice.

It paid me $20 an hour regardless of the

quality of footage. But, after I only

got paid for the usable footage. So,

after 3 weeks, I recorded Let's see

here. 3 hours and 51 minutes of footage,

but only 57 minutes was deemed quality

footage or 24% of it was. So, I made a

whopping $55

total, $40 of which was onboarding pity

money. Am I only getting paid for that

percentage that's accepted?

>> Yep.

>> And you think that's fair?

>> Um

Why would it be not fair?

>> Because I'm still doing the work. I'm

still recording for you 7 minutes.

>> If robot cannot see your hands, it can't

mimic the action. It's essentially like

economically useless. I'll be honest,

our global average of acceptance, like

what we pay,

is 72%.

>> So, you're saying I'm pretty bad at this

job.

>> I

I think it can get better over time.

>> Yes, you have to be comfortable with

strapping Big Brother to your head. The

recordings don't include audio, but this

company now has hours of footage of

inside my bedroom and my kitchen. Do I

like the idea of a nice little side

hustle where I can make money just doing

my everyday chores? Sure. But, this also

isn't my full-time job. The two women

who came to clean the apartment rely on

it for actual income. Shift pays

cleaning crews a fixed hourly rate,

regardless of acceptance of the video.

The women who cleaned my friend's

apartment each earned $100 for 3 hours

of work. That comes out to a little over

$33 an hour each. That's a bit more than

my friend usually pays for a similar

service to clean his space. Micro AGI

says the company aims to pay people more

than the local minimum wage or more than

going rates. Micro AGI is expanding

beyond cleaning in the US.

>> Shift is launching free private chefs in

San Francisco.

>> Yep, the tech bros are back. They sent

one to make me lunch. Not a tech bro, a

real chef.

>> The robots are going to love truffle.

>> But, through this all I kept thinking,

"Okay, I'm not making much money, but at

least I'm helping train the robots for

the betterment of society." But, then I

had another thought. What if I'm not

even doing that? What if I'm just

wearing a privacy-invading dystopian

science project on my head with no real

evidence that this will improve the

field? Is this a successful way of

training robots? Am I helping by wearing

this thing?

>> Yes and no. Yes, you are helping with a

really hard part of the robotics

problem, which is diversity or coverage

of possible physical experiences that

you can have. My prediction is that data

is not enough. You also need fundamental

advances in how we model the data. So,

this might be, for example, new neural

network architectures. The transformer

was so powerful for natural language. We

don't know what is the right

architecture yet for physical

intelligence.

>> This point of view video training method

is just one way of training robots. They

can also be trained through

teleoperation, simulations, and more.

Still, enough people believe this will

work. Micro AGI recently raised $55

million,

and it says it's already paid out $5

million

to 10,000 data collectors around the

world in countries like Turkey, Germany,

the UK, and more. And it's not just

Shift. Other companies are providing

money for your recording services. This

is happening globally by other

companies, including in India, where

workers are recording. Which brings us

to the darker side of this. As I watched

those women clean that apartment, I kept

thinking about the class divide behind

this robotic future. Low-paid workers

doing the physical labor today to help

build what Goldman Sachs predicts could

be a $38 billion humanoid robot market

by 2035. [music] And there are over

800,000 professional housekeepers in the

US, according to the Bureau of Labor

Statistics. And that's the low-end

estimate, not counting folks paid in

cash under the table. There's something

a little bit dystopian about people

collecting the data that could one day

automate their own jobs.

>> There is already new jobs being created.

There will be surely more jobs being

created. What Shift is literally

as per its name, is trying to suggest is

that this shift is happening already.

So, you would rather join it than be

anxious and watch TikTok about it.

>> He also floated an idea. Someday,

robotics companies could share their

profits with the people providing all

this training data. Yeah, uh-huh,

because that worked out so well for the

people whose work helped train large

language models. So, for now, the choice

is pretty simple. Strap in, do your

chores, and train the robots, [music]

and take a pretty tiny paycheck, or let

someone else do it. Training the robots

to kill the robots is definitely

what this company wants.

I think our work is done.

>> [music]