Imagine a team of cleaners arriving at your door, cameras strapped to their caps and connected via a lead to their mobile phones. You are not on a reality TV show, nor have you woken up in an Aldous Huxley novel. Instead, you are a resident of New York City, where an AI company is sending free cooking and cleaning staff straight to your home — with a catch: every inch of your apartment is being recorded to train the robots that will one day replace them.
The initiative, called Shift, is run by the AI firm Micro AGI. At an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, two mid-twenties college graduates who have bounced around the start-up world and were looking for work show up to clean. Because demand for the free cleans is so high, they are stationed in New York indefinitely, cleaning around five apartments a day, five days a week. The only difference between these guys and a regular cleaner is the gadgetry: built-in cameras attached to their caps.
“AI company Micro AGI sends free cleaners with cameras into New York homes to gather data for training replacement robots.”
The main aim of the offer is to perform tasks requiring dexterity — scrubbing, wiping, folding — to train the robots of the future to use their hands. As a result, the cleaners were intensely focused on their hands while carrying out the job. Bercan Kilic, Shift’s founder, told the BBC the goal of the data-gathering exercise is “to advance humanity”.
He pointed to existing AI models such as ChatGPT, which are able to create sentences based on previously written passages of text available online. But he said every kitchen, living room and tool is slightly different, so robots will need to be trained to adapt to being in different spaces and using different items. “In the real world, every object is different, the lighting is different and nothing is the same as it was a couple of hours earlier. Models need to learn how their hands, cameras and environments work together,” Kilic said.
The biggest difficulty, he added, is that to work, its cleaners will need to collect “tonnes” of data. The company’s business model relies on selling that data, anonymised, to robotics and other AI companies to train robots. Eventually, Kilic said Shift could offer free or discounted services covering “any skill humanity can demonstrate”, noting that as well as cleaning apartments in New York, the company also has mechanics fixing cars in Turkey.
Shift is part of a growing number of companies developing the next generation of autonomous robots, which tech bosses hope will be able to do everything from the washing up to serving as live-in personal carers. There appears to be no limit to what humanoid robots will one day be able to do — but first, they need to learn from humans, one free apartment cleaning at a time.