Dimensional pays $20 an hour to walk its robot dogs

Dimensional, a San Francisco startup, posted a job this month in the Facebook group "Bay Area Jobs" that reads like a joke: walk robot dogs for $20 an hour. No experience required, four to six hours per shift, no cleaning up after the pet. The ad has since been deleted, but The New York Times got to it first.

The catch is in the fine print. If a robot overheats mid-walk, you carry it back to the office, and it weighs about 33 pounds. The dogs are off-the-shelf Unitree units from China, around $2,000 each, controlled with a handheld remote or a phone app.

Why bother? Dimensional is building an open-source operating system for robots that AI agents can plug into, so people can give machines commands the way they already do with online services. A person steers the robot down the street while its cameras and sensors record the route, which gives the company ground truth data for teaching autonomous navigation in a city. It has already bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoids from makers in the US, China and Germany.

Founder Stash Pomichter, 26, says it is "honestly barbaric" that humans still do this kind of physical work. He is also frank about the result: when an AI agent did the walking, the dogs did noticeably worse than with people at the controls. In his words, agents are still very bad at controlling hardware, and humans are still needed in the loop.

Bottom line: before a robot can take physical work off our hands, a human has to do the robot's job first. For hours, at $20 an hour.