Key Takeaways
- AI robotics companies need high-quality videos to help train their robots.
- The videos are more specialized than something that’s been posted to social media already.
- The pay can range from $10 to $150 an hour, or $1 to $4 a minute.
Two weeks ago, an unnamed “robotics AI startup” in New York posted an ad on Craigslist looking for “first-person video of everyday activities with your iPhone.” The company wants footage of “cooking dinner or doing laundry at your own home.”
But why would an AI robotics company need this kind of video? It’s to train the robots, of course. “This data will be used to train AI models for humanoid robotics, helping robots learn tasks like navigation, object manipulation, and household activities,” the post reads.
Business Insider reports that the robotics industry is booming, with VCs investing more than $12 billion in the field this year, and startups are eager to acquire “high-quality” training data — meaning the robots can’t learn how to do things from any old clip on YouTube.
“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.
In January, Bloomberg reported that content creators were selling unused, unpublished video footage to AI companies for anywhere between $1 and $4 per minute. That’s because robots will need fine motor skills and the ability to move with precision if they are going to build housing in space (Jeff Bezos recently said at Italian Tech Week that robots will build space colonies where “millions” of people will live by choice).
For now, they’ll at least learn how to separate darks from lights and start a cold laundry load.
The pay for that kind of training can fetch up to $50 an hour, the CEO of AI training startup Micro1 told BI. Meanwhile, Hansen said “highly technical tasks” that include things like “handling surgical equipment” could earn much higher, around $150 an hour.
As for the training gig on Craigslist, it pays less — up to $20 an hour — and requires two to four hours a day of “specified tasks.” In addition to cooking and doing laundry, the company is looking for videos of people cleaning, opening doors, playing sports, and assembling furniture.
Related: Why AI is Not Replacing Human Video Editors (And Why Businesses Should Still Harness It)
Key Takeaways
- AI robotics companies need high-quality videos to help train their robots.
- The videos are more specialized than something that’s been posted to social media already.
- The pay can range from $10 to $150 an hour, or $1 to $4 a minute.
Two weeks ago, an unnamed “robotics AI startup” in New York posted an ad on Craigslist looking for “first-person video of everyday activities with your iPhone.” The company wants footage of “cooking dinner or doing laundry at your own home.”
But why would an AI robotics company need this kind of video? It’s to train the robots, of course. “This data will be used to train AI models for humanoid robotics, helping robots learn tasks like navigation, object manipulation, and household activities,” the post reads.
Business Insider reports that the robotics industry is booming, with VCs investing more than $12 billion in the field this year, and startups are eager to acquire “high-quality” training data — meaning the robots can’t learn how to do things from any old clip on YouTube.
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