Can a $55,000-plus robot load the dishwasher? -2-

Beneath the novelty of having a humanoid robot in my apartment was the awareness that the robot's every move was being streamed directly to teleoperators sitting in Tau's headquarters a few miles away.

The robotics field is pursuing the same playbook that powered the rise of large language models, aiming to teach AI models about the physical world by feeding them as much data as possible. But unlike chatbots that learned from internet archives and digitized books, there's no pre-existing corpus of data telling a machine how much downward pressure to put on a mop or the best way to grip a cup.

Tau is upfront about the fact that it uses humans to remotely operate the robots. The company makes it clear that the cleaning service is priced with data collection in mind, providing customers with an inexpensive cleaning in exchange for using their home as a training ground. While the cleaning cannot be done without video access, customers can request to have their data deleted after the cleaning. Otherwise, unblurred footage of your home is stored indefinitely to train future models.

"Many would never want to have a camera in the house," Koch said. "But also many just want us to fold their underwear. They don't have any privacy concerns."

I fell somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. I certainly wasn't ready for the robots to dig through my laundry hamper. I also opted out of letting the robots into my bathroom and bedroom, a choice that Tau provides customers by default. And that's why, before the robots' arrival, I carried out a diligent pre-cleaning ritual to remove any traces of identifying information in the living room and kitchen, putting away mail and taping printer paper over photos of myself.

After the robots noisily clunked down the stairs, the strangeness of the encounter began to fade. As I peeled the tape off my picture frames and glanced around the cleaned apartment, I wondered if I had been unnecessarily paranoid.

Somewhere in Tau's servers, hours of video footage may be getting dissected frame by frame, annotated and then used to train more capable robots. And if household robots ever become commonplace, perhaps a tiny bit of their intelligence could be traced back to their time in my apartment.

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-Christine Ji

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