AI training in exchange for maid service?
Grab your free cleaning while you can
Would you let someone train an AI on your apartment in exchange for cleaning it?
That’s the pitch from Shift, a company that will send a professional cleaner wearing a head-mounted camera to clean your place.
They make money by selling data to labs for training AIs on real-world activity.
Three things:
The privacy concerns are obvious. They claim to anonymize sensitive information, but that’s no guarantee. And while I might not care about big tech having a video of my kitchen sink, my roommate might.
Some will complain this is just training on humans to replace us. Yes please! I am all for training anything that will clean my toilet for me.
My biggest question is the numbers. Shift offers cleaners $20 per hour, and has paid out more than $5 million in Q1. That’s very expensive data. I can see the value in the first 100,000 sessions but it’s hard to see how the math squares for the millionth dirty carpet.
This reads like the classic stock market bubble company. Grab your free cleaning while you can.