But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket.
Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low.
My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.
Seems to be working fine for AI labs and their army of data annotators (for generating training data and RLHF). Is there any reason to robotics is extra tricky?
If I was confident that an AI couldn't do my job, I would happily sign up to do this "training" because it's free money and my job is at zero risk.
Why? Are you assuming these folks are also good at marketing, or customers are sharing via word of mouth?
I rent. I assume homeowners use AngiesList or Yelp, but those reviews don’t guarantee skill or that someone will be in high demand.
Seems fair to me (interjecting: not the parent poster). I rent, too, but have heard countless conversations along these lines among Proper Adults.
Often grown-up #1 complaining about their latest project and grown-up #2 offering someone that served them well in the past. Point being, bad experiences are both so common and costly... that those who are good tend to stand out and stay busy. IME, those listings or the phone book are most suitable when you don't have a relationship to leverage (effectively rolling the dice).
They don't need an army of contractors to do this. They just need a few, much like the AI labs that have a handful of SME staff for each particular subject to guide the corpus of data. See mathematics example.
It is not about knowing if someone can be bought. It's knowing just how much is just enough to buy them.
And then you have individuals whose pride is more than enough. See Terence Tao for a great example of a Useful Idiot.
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AST/AST_1957_...
One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.
You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?
Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.
There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.
Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.
Can OP or founders comment?
I’m the owner of this company
What would you like to know?
Just because I’m not in YC does mean anything
I have deep home service connections and have been doing internal ai app development for the past couple years
I think it’s lame people try and downplay a company because they aren’t SF based or in a YC cohort
I made the calls and got the contracts with these home service company who will document all their jobs for me and my team
We are data only. So we have no robots. We capture the entire job and structure the data for training
Our model is to capture hard to get training data for robotics
I think you might have misread my tone?
I was just trying to clear up anything the OP was curious about
Nothing was intended to come off as harsh
That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.
I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.
Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?
But I am doing what everyone does on here and sharing what I’m up to.
I’m not trying to say I’m special or anything like that.
This just happen to resonate
And I just got this new brand rolling out which is why I have no presence
I'm not trying to diss anything you do, kudos for trying!
I generally found that the HN crowd is difficult to please and perhaps a better avenue of getting feedback (and support) is to tailor material specifically for HN.
E.g. if you had a blog post talking about what you are trying to do, the problems you encountered and interesting solutions you are looking at, you'd get a much more interesting response? We get continuously assaulted by "the next big business idea" all the time, both here and in our professional lives. It's difficult to stand out in that deluge. Talking about the technical side can be an easier way to engage people in constructive discussions.
I didn’t expect this kind of response
Will get more on the blog and pushed to socials
Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched...yet
Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years.
Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right?
Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.
Maybe next time you should spend the few grand on all those tools, the hours it takes to learn how to use them, and can do it yourself!
Though I'm less sure about (4), considering the Worldcoin eyeball-harvesting scammers and the AI-bailout scammers are one and the same.
First pane has a supervisor, a plumber, and a robot, with the supervisor pointing to the robot.
Next pane is the robot watching the plumber work.
Next pane is the plumber watching the robot work.
Final pane is the robot with a bloody wrench standing over the dead plumber.
Mind-bogglingly casual acceptance of civil war when all you had to do was change the order to put "We will figure out a way to make it work" before "No one has a job".
Probably should do that before policing/military humanoid robots are cheap enough. If we don't, we're looking at our future as indentured servitude for capitalists for the rest of the lifetime this earth can support life.
Out of curiosity who are we killing or getting killed by? What amount of brainwashing will it take to get all these rubes to kill eachother to make the 1% richer?
I suppose whatever the amount is we reached it a while ago, given the number of people who have died for oil prices or to distract from this or that domestic political situation.
Pro-capitalist governments (cycle of corruption choosing the winners, revolving door between politics and business)
Human and robotic military conscripted to fight
Capitalists
Capitalists' workers paid enough to not be "worker class"
The other side:
Union supporters
Workers rights advocates
Socialists/communists
People who lost jobs/poverty class
Workers abused more than "average"
We have seen these types of wars before, and in the USA. Our own worker rights and union history was horrendously bloody. Even had the US military killing strikers and union folks. It's also where the private military, The Pinkertons, came from.
And prior to 1940s with FDR, there was a strong Socialist and Communist groups pushing for their respective changes. FDR appeased some of the demands with his reforms. And those reforms were credited to the success of the late 50's and 60's.