At what point do these services become free, in the Star Trek post-scarcity sense? How is the promise that automation will ultimately provides freedom from struggling for survival upheld? The piper has to be paid, unless the owner class all of a sudden does a one-eighty and decides they can stop raking in money.
According to the Star Trek timeline, we first need to experience the Bell Riots, the Eugenics Wars, and World War III before your proposal can be enacted.
the gen ai image on this page has a "shut off" label for the base of the human plumber's neck. To say nothing of the amusing drainage schematics (water flows up?)...
How is this on the front page? Its not a YC company. They have no internet presence besides a Claude website. No public mentions of funding or votes-of-trust. No names to vouch for them.
How is your process for selling the results? do you have a buyer lined up who is loaning the robots for this in some kinda sponsorship deal, do you intend to sell it as a service later on?
Well, the parent poster has a point. They are asking: why are you notable? Neither your company, nor you seem to have any track record, references, an indication that you know what you are doing or some prior art that'd be indicative of future performance.
That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.
I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.
Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?
I certainly don't like what the parent commenter said, but I find your response to be even more unprofessional and disrespectful, especially coming from the owner of the company.
Hi there, I have some experience with reinforcement learning, PPO, RLVR, and I trained both video game AIs and sim2real robot policies.
In my experience, videos from professionals are not enough to train a robot, because you lack all/most of the edge and failure cases. Let me illustrate with pilots: The average Airbus can land itself via autopilot. Autopilot will fly it to the correct location. You confirm the frequencies, it connects to the airport's guidance system and lands itself. Super boring. Videos of that won't help anyone become a proper pilot. The reason pilots train for years is to handle the 1 in a 1000 case where the autopilot doesn't work. And you suddenly have to take over in the middle of a messy approach.
Translated back to your plumbers, the real training is when the robot is carrying a 100kg metal pipe and then the owner's kids come running and pass through under it. Every professional will give their best to immediately reduce efficiency by making things stationary and SAFE. That's the training data that is truly valuable.
BTW, I am considering bootstrapping a startup that uses video game engines to generate training data to make robot policies anticipate physical effects and counter-steer before they happen. Like putting down a heavy steel pipe before it drops due to gravity. With 2 bugfixes merged into the Unreal Engine, I have some experience there ;) So I might soon be in the business of selling custom training data.
Thank you for replying. Yes I also think its lame that we have to use the "YC" sticker or "SF-based" heuristics to determine a company's validity but we live in world full of snake oil and vaporware and signal:noise nowadays is crazy high.
Props to you for going out and making things happen but given what I know about your company from your
a) claude-coded website
b) faceless twitter
most people or investors would conclude you're a bot at best, a scam at worst.
I don't say any of this with condescension (on rereading my first post, I'm sorry if the tone was harsh).
There's obviously a strong incentive for homeowners to participate: they don't have to pay for a service that is often valued at hundreds of dollars.
But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket.
Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low.
My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.
> But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
They don't need an army of contractors to do this. They just need a few, much like the AI labs that have a handful of SME staff for each particular subject to guide the corpus of data. See mathematics example.
It is not about knowing if someone can be bought. It's knowing just how much is just enough to buy them.
> Are you assuming these folks are ... or customers are sharing via word of mouth?
Seems fair to me. Interjecting: not the parent poster.
I rent, too, but have heard countless conversations along these lines among Proper Adults. Often grown-up #1 complaining about their latest project and grown-up #2 offering someone that served them well in the past. Bad experiences are common so this appears fairly often; those who are good tend to stand out.
IME, those listings or the phone book are what you go to when you don't have a relationship to leverage, effectively rolling the dice.
Yes, "truly skilled" contractors get work entirely through word of mouth. All the best contractors I have discovered were through a relationship, and are always fully booked, frequently doing work on my home due to our relationship, and not due to natural availability.
>But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
Seems to be working fine for AI labs and their army of data annotators (for generating training data and RLHF). Is there any reason to robotics is extra tricky?
> My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution
If I was confident that an AI couldn't do my job, I would happily sign up to do this "training" because it's free money and my job is at zero risk.
>But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
They don't need any local companies to participate in this program. This company can hire engineers with an understanding of code (even better, engineering/safety principles behind the code) from the industry. Further, they can go and recruit intelligent people who graduated from trade schools but couldn't get that apprenticeship from local unions. That's all they need, as long as home owners are compensated for any screw ups.
The first line 'Partnerships with home-service companies ...' tells the whole story. No local company with decent trades people on their payroll want to work with home-service companies, it's always the lowest bidder who wants to get that job from home-service companies. Who are these lowest bidders? Someone brand new, of course.
> This company can hire engineers with an understanding of code (even better, engineering/safety principles behind the code) from the industry
I hate to break it to you, but previous waves of AI did exactly the same thing (e.g. expert systems). Every wave of AI insists that the problem is on the algorithmic side and that they've figured it out this time.
I agree that we should see how this plays out, but don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Much like software development, I suspect there are many strongly practical reasons why the real world has a tendency to not align with the specified standards. You can't keep insisting it's mere incompetence without this whole thing sounding like a grift.
The issue is not about 1%, but one of the cost of hiring trades people. HVAC companies are charging $25k for a three-ton HVAC unit+furnace in California, when the cost of the the unit is 5k. And these trades people don't want to fix any problem instead they want a full replacement. What is going to then?
Any person with a decent STEM education can learn these trades for DIY'ing. They can learn safety protocols too. When HVAC/plumbing/electricals are installed in a way conducive to robots, it is easier for those who can't afford a lot of money, to work and fix these issues.
The world (esp in residential) is not a union of two disjoint sets: (a) robots/AI (b) trades people. In fact, the third world is huge: an average tinkerer without being burdened by gatekeepers of the trade can fix many issues when these installs happen. At least it becomes easy to replace parts by oneself, instead of hiring a technician.
Your average technician is no better than a tinkerer. For instance, look at HVAC symptoms: https://imgur.com/a/FXf3iXf That's what many HVAC techs carry, they even carry apps that just takes the inputs (pressures, temperatures, etc) and spew out what could be the cause. What if a HVAC system is built in such a way that it is easy to replace parts? Right now, to replace compressor, one has to discharge the refrigerant, unbraze suction and liquid lines, vaccum out, then use nitrogen, braze both lines, then charge it back. Can we have a world where it is easy to reduce these steps so that it becomes easier for robots (as well as for humans)
How about having universal VFD boards the way ABB sells VFDs for water pumps and other motors, instead of getting tied with a particular brand?
The real problem is whether average home owner can bear the cost of trades people? Sure, trades is just like Accenture IT consulting: one rock star software engineer with 30 dummies who can jack up the billable hours; same goes for law firms too.
Have you ever heard of overhead? When running a technician type job, a 5x cost multiplier on materials / labour is extremely reasonable. I ran an FTTP ISP, and the minimum cost of a service call started at $250, with labour (at $25/hour) frequently being only $50 of inputs to that cost (1/5th of the cost). Every service call has to cover the cost of the travel time (easily 1+ hour), fuel, vehicle, insurance, tools, and materials. Plus there is dead time when a tech isn't being fully utilized. That means billing 5x to 10x the labour cost just to break even.
Having AI robots do the work does not materially change or reduce that basic cost structure, as labour is one of the smaller inputs to the cost of the service call.
I get that people on the outside of the service industry looking at 5x or 10x markups see them as being "ridiculous", but that is because they aren't looking behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made. The service industry is nothing like tech where the marginal cost of delivering software drops as the number of the users (and developers) increases. A single truck equipped with the required tools can only be used for so many service calls in a given week, and swapping out the human with a robot isn't going to change that. Moreover, increasing utilization significantly beyond 8-12 hours per day seems unlikely to happen as there probably isn't much appetite in the general population to meet and greet a service robot into their home at 3am then explain and show what the issue is that needs to be resolved. There's no way that a 3am service call can cost 50% less than daytime service call.
In contrast, the marginal cost overhead of spinning up one more software developer for big tech is almost nothing. You might spend $2000 for a computer and another $1000 for a desk and chair for them to sit on, and virtually everything else (data centers, servers, networks...) is shared infrastructure. That's nothing compared to trades where you have to buy a truck and outfit it with tools for $100k to support 1 employee. [The bucket truck I have cost $125k, and equipping it with the bare minimum of tools required was another $25k on top of that.]
Sometimes I wonder if anyone has done the basic napkin math to figure out if pushing AI into certain jobs is going to be even remotely economically viable. Personally I view this as a symptom of the larger problem that there are very few "good" ideas left for VCs to throw piles of otherwise idle money into, which directly leads to a kind of VC slop where unprofitable ideas get subsidized and offered to the general public "for free"... until it isn't. Then we'll be stuck with monopoly AI HVAC firms and their 27B stroke six forms making everything miserable for us.
I am not against trades, nor am I against overhead. HVAC trade is something I follow. Many honest HVAC trades people on their YouTube channels say how many companies are ripping off of customers: recommending full replacement instead of fixing it; using tools like ServiceTitan and apps to add more line items to rip off customers; etc. r/hvacadvice on Reddit attests this new phenomenon. This is not about how home owners find trades expensive. Fellow trades people also agree with it.
I understand about overhead. Diesel price, truck depreciation, commercial space lease, dispatcher salary, non-uniform demand, workers comp, taxes, ...
Absolutely, one should charge 200% if they want a service at 3 am or during weekends. I would even charge 50% extra if they have a furnace in the attic, crawl/inaccessible spaces. 100% extra, if their attic/crawl faces have rodent feces. Home owners should better put these stuff in an accessible mechanical room. Accessibility is an important factor, and helps trades people to troubleshoot faster.
It is known that the AI labs are going for all economically useful work.
Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched...yet
Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years.
Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right?
Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.
I'm seeing a lot of surprised people on this thread. Have a look at the more recent YC batches of startups. Count all the non-AI ones, and subtract from total. And don't pretend to not know what the end game of something like YC is here. And YC is not the only one.
One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.
You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?
You’re almost right but missing an entire category of startup: “egocentric” data. A lot of the most high revenue startups right now are, essentially, recruitment agencies for frontier labs to get video of skilled workers. OpenAI and others are spending billions per year with the various startups. We aren’t witnessing specialized startups training for specific sectors, we are witnessing training startups trying to hoover as much video as possible.
Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.
There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.
I think a lot of the founders of such companies know that their companies have an expiry date and no viable exit strategy.
Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.
There will not be, they will find that the videos submitted are all of noise quality after the training starts, and then they would need videos of certain, specific actions that were basically not recorded. and it will go on and on for quite a long time.
HVAC tech here. Good luck. There are so many times where I have to reach somewhere and can't actually see what I'm looking for and have to go off feel alone. And I only know what it feels like because I've felt that particular part hundreds of times before. I think there are some things that could maybe work, but they would be incredibly basic tasks that are probably just cheaper to have a human do. In any case good luck.
33 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] threadCan OP or founders comment?
I’m the owner of this company
What would you like to know?
Just because I’m not in YC does mean anything
I have deep home service connections and have been doing internal ai app development for the past couple years
I’ve trained my own deepseek derivative so I’m familiar with the process
I think it’s lame you try and downplay a company because they aren’t SF based and in a YC cohort
I made the calls and got the contracts with these home service company who will document all their jobs for me and my team
That is not to say that your idea or company are bad, but there's very little substance that would indicate that I should care.
I don't care that you trained your own deepseek derivative or that you got contracts. What you are proposing to do is interesting, but a mission to Mars is also interesting. If it's some random person proposing a mission to Mars, I don't care because they have no chance to actually achieve anything meaningful. If it's a person who has credible support and a plan, sure, now I'm listening.
Why should I care about you doing it? How are you proposing to solve the hard problems, which are in the robotics space?
In my experience, videos from professionals are not enough to train a robot, because you lack all/most of the edge and failure cases. Let me illustrate with pilots: The average Airbus can land itself via autopilot. Autopilot will fly it to the correct location. You confirm the frequencies, it connects to the airport's guidance system and lands itself. Super boring. Videos of that won't help anyone become a proper pilot. The reason pilots train for years is to handle the 1 in a 1000 case where the autopilot doesn't work. And you suddenly have to take over in the middle of a messy approach.
Translated back to your plumbers, the real training is when the robot is carrying a 100kg metal pipe and then the owner's kids come running and pass through under it. Every professional will give their best to immediately reduce efficiency by making things stationary and SAFE. That's the training data that is truly valuable.
BTW, I am considering bootstrapping a startup that uses video game engines to generate training data to make robot policies anticipate physical effects and counter-steer before they happen. Like putting down a heavy steel pipe before it drops due to gravity. With 2 bugfixes merged into the Unreal Engine, I have some experience there ;) So I might soon be in the business of selling custom training data.
Feel free to email me at hn at hajo me
Props to you for going out and making things happen but given what I know about your company from your
a) claude-coded website b) faceless twitter
most people or investors would conclude you're a bot at best, a scam at worst.
I don't say any of this with condescension (on rereading my first post, I'm sorry if the tone was harsh).
But what is the incentive for contractors to participate, and how does it overcome the enormous disincentive of "You are training your replacement"?
My guess is that truly skilled contractors in these trades are not hurting for work. So I doubt they're going to be swayed by just a few more extra jobs added to their docket.
Less skilled contractors who are desperate for work might be taken in, but then the quality of their output is likely to be worse, and the value of that training data is likely to be low.
My guess is that people in skilled trades who are used to working with their hands are going to be even more skeptical than white-collar folks about an AI revolution, and more guarded against change in that direction.
They don't need an army of contractors to do this. They just need a few, much like the AI labs that have a handful of SME staff for each particular subject to guide the corpus of data. See mathematics example.
It is not about knowing if someone can be bought. It's knowing just how much is just enough to buy them.
Why? Are you assuming these folks are also good at marketing, or customers are sharing via word of mouth?
I rent. I assume homeowners use AngiesList or Yelp, but those reviews don’t guarantee skill or that someone will be in high demand.
Seems fair to me. Interjecting: not the parent poster.
I rent, too, but have heard countless conversations along these lines among Proper Adults. Often grown-up #1 complaining about their latest project and grown-up #2 offering someone that served them well in the past. Bad experiences are common so this appears fairly often; those who are good tend to stand out.
IME, those listings or the phone book are what you go to when you don't have a relationship to leverage, effectively rolling the dice.
Seems to be working fine for AI labs and their army of data annotators (for generating training data and RLHF). Is there any reason to robotics is extra tricky?
If I was confident that an AI couldn't do my job, I would happily sign up to do this "training" because it's free money and my job is at zero risk.
They don't need any local companies to participate in this program. This company can hire engineers with an understanding of code (even better, engineering/safety principles behind the code) from the industry. Further, they can go and recruit intelligent people who graduated from trade schools but couldn't get that apprenticeship from local unions. That's all they need, as long as home owners are compensated for any screw ups.
The first line 'Partnerships with home-service companies ...' tells the whole story. No local company with decent trades people on their payroll want to work with home-service companies, it's always the lowest bidder who wants to get that job from home-service companies. Who are these lowest bidders? Someone brand new, of course.
I hate to break it to you, but previous waves of AI did exactly the same thing (e.g. expert systems). Every wave of AI insists that the problem is on the algorithmic side and that they've figured it out this time.
I agree that we should see how this plays out, but don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Much like software development, I suspect there are many strongly practical reasons why the real world has a tendency to not align with the specified standards. You can't keep insisting it's mere incompetence without this whole thing sounding like a grift.
Any person with a decent STEM education can learn these trades for DIY'ing. They can learn safety protocols too. When HVAC/plumbing/electricals are installed in a way conducive to robots, it is easier for those who can't afford a lot of money, to work and fix these issues.
The world (esp in residential) is not a union of two disjoint sets: (a) robots/AI (b) trades people. In fact, the third world is huge: an average tinkerer without being burdened by gatekeepers of the trade can fix many issues when these installs happen. At least it becomes easy to replace parts by oneself, instead of hiring a technician.
Your average technician is no better than a tinkerer. For instance, look at HVAC symptoms: https://imgur.com/a/FXf3iXf That's what many HVAC techs carry, they even carry apps that just takes the inputs (pressures, temperatures, etc) and spew out what could be the cause. What if a HVAC system is built in such a way that it is easy to replace parts? Right now, to replace compressor, one has to discharge the refrigerant, unbraze suction and liquid lines, vaccum out, then use nitrogen, braze both lines, then charge it back. Can we have a world where it is easy to reduce these steps so that it becomes easier for robots (as well as for humans)
How about having universal VFD boards the way ABB sells VFDs for water pumps and other motors, instead of getting tied with a particular brand?
The real problem is whether average home owner can bear the cost of trades people? Sure, trades is just like Accenture IT consulting: one rock star software engineer with 30 dummies who can jack up the billable hours; same goes for law firms too.
Having AI robots do the work does not materially change or reduce that basic cost structure, as labour is one of the smaller inputs to the cost of the service call.
I get that people on the outside of the service industry looking at 5x or 10x markups see them as being "ridiculous", but that is because they aren't looking behind the scenes to see how the sausage is made. The service industry is nothing like tech where the marginal cost of delivering software drops as the number of the users (and developers) increases. A single truck equipped with the required tools can only be used for so many service calls in a given week, and swapping out the human with a robot isn't going to change that. Moreover, increasing utilization significantly beyond 8-12 hours per day seems unlikely to happen as there probably isn't much appetite in the general population to meet and greet a service robot into their home at 3am then explain and show what the issue is that needs to be resolved. There's no way that a 3am service call can cost 50% less than daytime service call.
In contrast, the marginal cost overhead of spinning up one more software developer for big tech is almost nothing. You might spend $2000 for a computer and another $1000 for a desk and chair for them to sit on, and virtually everything else (data centers, servers, networks...) is shared infrastructure. That's nothing compared to trades where you have to buy a truck and outfit it with tools for $100k to support 1 employee. [The bucket truck I have cost $125k, and equipping it with the bare minimum of tools required was another $25k on top of that.]
Sometimes I wonder if anyone has done the basic napkin math to figure out if pushing AI into certain jobs is going to be even remotely economically viable. Personally I view this as a symptom of the larger problem that there are very few "good" ideas left for VCs to throw piles of otherwise idle money into, which directly leads to a kind of VC slop where unprofitable ideas get subsidized and offered to the general public "for free"... until it isn't. Then we'll be stuck with monopoly AI HVAC firms and their 27B stroke six forms making everything miserable for us.
I understand about overhead. Diesel price, truck depreciation, commercial space lease, dispatcher salary, non-uniform demand, workers comp, taxes, ...
Absolutely, one should charge 200% if they want a service at 3 am or during weekends. I would even charge 50% extra if they have a furnace in the attic, crawl/inaccessible spaces. 100% extra, if their attic/crawl faces have rodent feces. Home owners should better put these stuff in an accessible mechanical room. Accessibility is an important factor, and helps trades people to troubleshoot faster.
Creatives and all white collar jobs are the easiest to target first, with AI labs basically pitching individuals and businesses:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
If you find yourself laid off or work has run dry from a previous gig because AI can do it better than you, you'll naturally consider a role which AI hasn't touched...yet
Then you see AI and robotics labs going after the margins of blue collar jobs, which then they will also say again to the blue collar workers:
"AI will free you up with more time to do 'other meaningful things'"
I can't imagine what the world will look like if you repeat this N times, or even in 10 years.
Because you need to pay your rent, and bills right?
Unless rent, bills and all the rest of it doesn't mean anything anymore in this 'AI abundance' age.
One company doesn't need to do everything. But 100-1000 smaller companies, each taking on a piece of every-day work that people are paid to do and replacing it with AI, is definitely doable and can pay very well if deployed at scale. It doesn't have to be perfect all the time either - just cheap, fast, and good enough. As it always has been.
You didn't really think they are training vision models so they can just drive your car around, or that they are training robots to perform physical tasks so they can just use them in factories, did you?
Personally, I’m not convinced these startups have much life in them. They’re popular right now because they are low effort as there is a huge demand from the frontier labs, but a year from now, there’ll be more than enough data.
There are at least a dozen in YC and probably hundreds in total.
Probably the strategy is making as much money as possible while there's demand from the AI labs and then the founder will figure out their next steps with a bit more money in their accounts.
https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/luminist/SF/AST/AST_1957_...