Shift offers free meals so it can film kitchens for robot training

In short: A service called Shift is offering free home cooked meals in exchange for recording chefs’ hand movements to help train home robots.

What's going on

Shift, a division of German startup Microagi, has expanded from offering free home cleaning in New York City to offering free home cooked meals in San Francisco. The deal is simple. A contractor comes to your home to do the task, and a camera records the work.

In a recent example reported by Wired, a private chef arrived wearing a hat with a small camera attached, about the size of a GoPro. The camera recorded a first-person view of cooking, including chopping, stirring, plating, and cleaning up. The videos are uploaded as “training data,” which is practice material that helps teach AI systems, similar to how a student learns by watching many examples.

This kind of recording is often called “egocentric data collection.” It means capturing what someone sees while doing a task, especially what their hands do. Companies want this because there is no huge, ready-made library of household videos that show detailed movements, the way the internet provides lots of text for chatbots.

Microagi CEO Bercan Kilic told Wired the company also wants to build a marketplace where people can earn money by recording and selling these first-person task videos.

What to watch

Filming inside homes raises practical questions about privacy and consent, since cameras can capture personal spaces and habits. There are also safety concerns if the long-term goal is robots that handle sharp tools and hot surfaces. If more companies copy the “free service for video” model, it could become a common way everyday homes are turned into practice rooms for future household robots.

Source: Wired