It’s been a rough few weeks for humanoid robots.
At a store in Shenzhen, China, ironically named “Future Era,” a robot face-planted while attempting to dance to “Billie Jean” and had to be dragged offstage. At the Beijing Half Marathon, another robot collapsed into a heap of parts on the course.
While humanoid robots — like the ones from Neo, Figure and Boston Dynamics — are genuinely impressive and have generated a lot of excitement (the idea of never having to fold laundry again sounds dreamy), they aren’t exactly ready for primetime. Part of the problem is the vast amount of data they need to train on to become fully functional.
Physical AI companies are trying to remedy that with a clever approach that could accelerate their development and result in cheaper labor in the short-term — if you’re willing to accept some privacy compromises.
While LLMs are gobbling up data, humanoid robots require orders of magnitude more. “We need hundreds of times more data,” Bercan Kilic, CEO of microAGI, said, adding that in the next five years it’s “very unlikely” that robots “can come and do something safely and accurately — even simple tasks like folding.”
But all that friction has created a unique opportunity right now for someone looking for cheaper labor — if they’re willing to let their personal space be recorded as training data. Kilic’s company, Shift, launched free home cleanings this week for anyone in NYC. They will send cleaners to your apartment as long as you are comfortable with the entire session being filmed and then uploaded to train robots.
Kilic sees it as a fair way to reimburse people for their data.
“We want to encourage people to get well paid for their data and make buyers pay for it. The rights are wealth transfers. This is a new AI economy where you earn more and pay less,” he said.
Each home visit generates the kind of messy, unpredictable real-world footage no lab can replicate. Shift hasn’t said how long the free service will run, but the vision is larger: regular people will trade access to their spaces — and eventually their roof cleanings, plumber visits, car maintenance — for subsidized services, while the robots quietly learn.
Of course, you have to be comfortable with a tech company capturing intimate details of your rooms. The company says the data stays anonymized and is sold to robot developers. But questions remain about who exactly buys it, what they can do with it, and whether a free scrub-down is really worth handing over a video map of your house to a startup.