What Does It Take to Run a Robot Data Factory?

Josh Gao says running a robot data factory is more painful than a camera and a signup form, because much of the hardware sent into the world did not exist until Mecka designed and produced it. Tactile gloves are the example. Nothing off the shelf can be worn through a day, report how much force a person applies, and come back as a data set a robotics model can train on.

The factory then runs that hardware through three or four product cycles, decides what is useful, and scales production. Distribution reaches thousands of homes and thousands of businesses. The upload lines have to carry the hundreds of petabytes Mecka is dealing with. After the files arrive, they still have to pass quality gates and computer vision before they teach a robot anything.

The data engine is that whole loop.