Doing three loads of laundry on a Sunday morning isn’t fun. But what if you could get paid for it?
The startups that help train AI chatbots, such as Encord and Micro1, say they’re seeing a surge in demand from robotics companies hungry for high-quality training data — and creating it often requires paying people to film themselves performing tasks like folding laundry, loading dishwashers, or making espresso.
Robotics has become one of the hottest fields in AI, with prominent investors like Vinod Khosla betting that the sector will soon experience its own ChatGPT moment as the technology continues to advance. Venture capital investment in robotics is surging, reaching $12.1 billion so far this year, according to PitchBook data.
At the same time, the robotics industry has a data problem. Companies like OpenAI, which build large language models (LLMs), can train on massive troves of data from the internet. Robots require different kinds of data, though, to learn basic dexterity so they can ultimately join a factory line or mop your kitchen floor.
“Unlike LLMs, robotics doesn’t have the internet as a ready-made dataset — you have to generate training data from scratch in the real world, which is far harder,” Ulrik Hansen, cofounder of data labeling startup Encord, told Business Insider.
Hansen says his startup is seeing four times as much volume for this kind of data compared to last year.
For humans, the money isn’t half-bad — as long as you’re willing to wear a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to record yourself doing things like folding clothes on a table.
That’s something Ali Ansari, the CEO of AI training startup Micro1, says his company pays “incredibly well” for, citing rates of $25 to $50 an hour.
Hansen, the Encord cofounder, says rates can reach up to $150 an hour for videos of highly technical tasks, like handling surgical equipment.
Other AI training startups are also entering the market.
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Scale AI, for example, says that it’s rapidly expanding into robotics and has established a dedicated lab at its San Francisco headquarters, which has produced over 100,000 hours of training footage to date, the company wrote in a blog post published last month.
The demand comes from companies like Physical Intelligence, a humanoid robotics firm backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, which the Information reported is in talks to raise at a $5 billion valuation, and Boston Dynamics, the company best-known for its robot dogs. Encord cited both as customers; Scale AI says Physical Intelligence is a customer, too.
It’s still early days, and finding suitable training data for robots remains a challenge.
One robotics startup resorted to posting an ad on Craigslist, promising to pay people $10 to $20 an hour to film themselves using their iPhones while doing chores, such as cooking dinner.
The startup’s founder, who requested anonymity as the company is still in stealth mode, told Business Insider that finding good training data remains a major hurdle.
“There are no major datasets you can buy,” the founder said. “The biggest ones are around 5,000 hours, which is not nearly enough.”
