AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train robots — SkimNews
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- HUMXN is offering free plumbing, electrical, HVAC, air-duct cleaning, and carpet cleaning in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Miami to homeowners who allow technicians wearing "wearable capture technology" to record repair work inside their homes.
- Founder Thomas Unise said "the next generation of AI is going to need more than text and images from the internet" and that "robots need to understand how skilled people interact with the physical world."
- HUMXN said it pays residents for the right to record on their premises and ensures service professionals still get paid, positioning the model in contrast to Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI, which have been "accused of stealing data to train their models."
- The three pilot cities were selected for their "very different climates" so HUMXN could capture varied housing types, equipment, problems, and environments in one dataset.
- HUMXN argues natural technician movements can't be replicated in lab settings, and that recording on-site gives AI models insight into diagnosis, tool selection, adapting to changing conditions, and confirming a job was completed successfully.
Why it matters: HUMXN is testing a pay-for-data model in three U.S. metros with deliberately varied climates precisely because real-world physical data can't be scraped from the internet like the text and images that trained today's chatbots — and because Meta, Nvidia, and OpenAI face accusations of taking training data without consent, HUMXN's pitch is that tradespeople and homeowners should be paid for it.
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