San Francisco Startup Pays Humans to Walk Its Robot Dogs

The gig requires more than just holding a leash. Walkers must manage four-to-six-hour shifts and be physically capable of lugging a 33-pound robot back to the office should its internal systems overheat. Dimensional, which is developing an open-source operating system for AI-controlled labor, currently utilizes over 100 units of the $2,000 Go2 model from Chinese manufacturer Unitree.

Founder Stash Pomichter views the current reliance on human labor for manual tasks as barbaric, yet he acknowledges the limitations of his own technology. The robots are currently struggling with basic locomotion, necessitating the human supervisors to capture the video and sensor data required to improve the AI agents. While the startup aims to eventually automate construction and hauling, the machines are still in the early stages of learning how to interact with the physical world.