Inside the race to train robots on human work

Tyler Le/BI One Friday evening this summer, a private chef prepared a three-course meal — burrata salad, baked salmon, and tiramisu — for two friends and me.

The dinner was free, but there was a catch.

A camera mounted on Chef Aliser Demir's baseball cap was recording everything.

Demir came to my apartment through Shift, the data-collection arm of the German startup Microagi .

The startup offers free private chefs in San Francisco in exchange for first-person footage of their work.

Shift offered to pay Demir, who runs a private chef business, his usual rate of $100 to $150 per person.

"I've been feeding people since I started this job," Demir said.

"Now I am also feeding AI." This story is part of a series called The AI Data Grab , an inside look at how tech giants are increasingly turning to workers, users, and the physical world to get data to train AI.

Read more stories in this series here .

Demir is part of a global effort to collect data on how humans interact with the physical world, with the goal of building machines that can staff factories, clean homes, and even fight wars .

Elon Musk, who is betting Tesla's future on the humanoid robot Optimus , has promoted a utopian future of "sustainable abundance," in which AI and robots make human labor largely optional.

Shift pays more than 35,000 people to record physical tasks, from cooking meals to repairing engines.

Courtesy of Shift For now, those ambitions face a problem: a massive shortage of training data.

"It is widely agreed in the robotics world that data is the key bottleneck," said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies technology and industrial policy.