Marketplace Tech · Friday, August 7, 2026
Tech startups are employing gig workers to film everyday tasks such as doing laundry and loading dishwashers to gather data for training humanoid robots. Joanna Stern reported on this trend, noting that companies like Micro AGI are paying individuals to wear head-mounted cameras and record their actions, focusing on hand movements for robot dexterity.
“Tech startups pay gig workers to train robots to do chores.”
“So companies like this Micro AGI are so focused and so hungry for that data that they are now paying people like myself to wear these cameras on our heads and to film ourselves doing all of our everyday tasks so that we can start to build massive amounts of models and training data to train these models on that boring task.”
“What they're really trying to get here is information about hand interaction in the real world.”