Okay, this is wild. Figure, the humanoid robot company, just dropped a bombshell: they’ve launched Index, a gig economy platform. But it’s not for delivering food or driving ride-shares. It’s for you, dear human, to film yourself doing chores – think folding laundry, washing dishes – all while wearing cameras and sensors. Why? To generate mountains of data to train their robots.
They’re not messing around either, planning to drop a cool $1 billion over the next year on data and compute for this project. The uptake is insane already: 264,000 app downloads, 44,000 weekly active users, 16 million videos uploaded from 108 countries. We’re talking 30 minutes of video every single second flowing into Figure’s data centers.
It’s an incredibly efficient, if somewhat surreal, feedback loop. Humans are literally creating the dataset to automate their own domestic labor, teaching robots to do the very tasks they’re filming. Talk about training your own replacement. The implications for the future of work, and indeed, housework, are staggering.