An AI startup is offering free home cleaning in New York City — as long as customers let the company record their dirty apartments to train its robots. Shift made a splashy launch Thursday, and has since gotten demand for “thousands and thousands of bookings,” US General Manager Harry Kilberg told Semafor.
Shift is an offshoot of Germany-based Microagi, which already oversees data collection work in several countries — the data is anonymized and sold to AI labs. It also uses some of the data for its internal research lab.
Kilberg said Shift is trying to “democratize the AI economy” by, say, allowing someone to clean their neighbor’s apartment for free — and still get paid, by Shift, for the recording. The company plans to launch in more cities and offer more services beyond cleaning. Why start in NYC? It’s “the beating heart of the world’s economy” — but also, “it’s pretty dirty to begin with and we’re hoping the free cleaning can help.”