I Got a Free Meal From a Private Chef—Who Filmed It All to Train Robots

When the private chef sent by Shift arrived at my apartment to cook a three-course meal, he was already ready to record. He walked through my front door wearing a baseball hat with a blocky, white camera attached to the brim.

I signed up for a free lunch in exchange for the whole experience being recorded and uploaded as training data. As chef Ali unpacked his supplies and started on a gazpacho, the hat cam recorded his hand movements, with the intention that this data could help build a better robot—one with culinary expertise.

It’s all part of the growing boom of egocentric data collection—recording human hand movements from a first-person point of view. Shift made waves earlier this year by providing free cleaning services in New York City under a similar arrangement: Let Shift record tasks in your home and, in exchange, you get a gratis service. The company expanded in San Francisco by offering free home-cooked meals. If, in the not-so-distant future, I’m able to buy a skilled humanoid to coexist with at home, I sure hope that its knife-wielding skills are up to par.

Shift is a division of the larger German startup Microagi, which focuses on deploying robots in real life. “The goal of Shift is twofold. First, allow people to join the AI economy,” says Microagi CEO Bercan Kilic. “The other part is to handhold the entire society and governments together, from today until the abundance.”

In the short term, Kilic sees this as a way to build a marketplace where contractors can make some cash recording videos and contributing to the improvement of AI models. Looking at the horizon, he believes impending tech innovations may usher in a new, utopian-esque age of widespread wealth.

This year, I’ve spent dozens of hours with an iPhone strapped to my head, attempting to understand this growing avenue of the gig economy. I’ve recorded my hand movements for DoorDash while scrambling eggs for breakfast and recorded my fingers tying shoelaces, over and over again, for another data collection startup. Shift offers a similar gig work setup for people who want to record and sell their own egocentric data. While my payouts have been skimpy, I was previously successful in monetizing my physical movements, to some degree, on other platforms. I felt curious about what it would feel like to be on the other side of the camera, for once.

Free Lunch

The uniform for Shift chefs blends elements of a restaurant worker’s outfit with cyborg qualities. Ali, the chef, was wearing a white shirt and pants with a brown apron wrapped around his body. The camera attached to his hat was roughly the size of a GoPro, with a white wire running through the top and down his back. The wire was attached to a smartphone, where the recordings from this free lunch were stored. It jiggled a bit as he cooked.

I’ve never had a private chef before in my cramped apartment, so I felt a bit weird just standing by in the kitchen as he prepared a gazpacho appetizer and started chopping trumpet mushrooms. The finesse and dexterity displayed (and recorded) with his knife skills go far beyond what my rudimentary chops could help train a robot to cook. My sense of awkwardness only increased as I remembered that everything was being recorded. I should have scrubbed that oven more before it was immortalized as robot training data. Even if the robots don’t mind a bit of mess, my human ego still prevails.

The apartment smelled amazing as Ali got started on the main course, baked salmon with a creamy zucchini sauce, and I began to loosen up. Similar to how I respond when people use Meta’s AI glasses to record in public, I initially froze under the weight of being perceived so directly by technology. But as I chomped on the crispy salmon skin at my dinner table, I considered these recordings from a broader perspective. My kitchen would be just a single drop in the vast ocean of robot training data. I was beginning to get over myself and give in to the humanoid future.