San Francisco startup offered $20 an hour to walk robot dogs for AI training: report

A San Francisco startup called Dimensional reportedly posted a job listing offering $20 an hour to walk robot dogs around the city for four to six hours at a time. No robotics experience was required, and paid training was included. Workers also had to be comfortable carrying the roughly 33-pound robots, which sometimes overheat or stop working. Founder Stash Pomichter told The New York Times that human operators steered the robot dogs while cameras and sensors collected data about their surroundings, part of an effort to improve how AI-powered robots operate independently. The company, based in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood, is developing an open-source operating system that lets AI agents control robots and has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the U.S., China and Germany. The robot dogs used for the walks cost about $2,000 each and were made by Chinese company Unitree. Pomichter said the experiment showed that "agents are still very bad at controlling hardware" and that humans are still needed in the loop, and he hopes the technology will eventually put robots to work in factories, data centers, construction sites and security roles.

(Source：Foxbusiness)