Dimensional Pays $20 an Hour to Walk Robot Dogs in San Francisco

A San Francisco startup called Dimensional is offering $20 an hour for an unusual job: walking robot dogs around the neighborhood. The aim is to test whether artificial intelligence can control robots and carry out physical tasks independently, without constant human intervention.

According to a report in The New York Times, the company advertised the role on October 5 in a Facebook jobs group. The post was later deleted. Dimensional is based in the city's Dogpatch district and offers paid training. Workers then operate four-legged robots on outdoor test routes across the city, in sessions of four to six hours.

Bought, not built

Dimensional does not build its own robots. It buys them from American, Chinese and German manufacturers. The company has purchased 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots to support its experiments. The dogs come from a Chinese maker at about $2,000 each, and they can be controlled manually or from a phone.

AI still needs people

The company's latest experiment compared two approaches: running the robots through human control, and running them through an AI agent. The results showed how hard it remains to rely on AI to operate robots fully autonomously.

The report concludes that AI systems are still weak at controlling physical devices, and that humans remain a necessary part of operating and supervising robots for now.

The episode is a reminder that robotics lags behind the rapid progress of AI in software. Until models can reliably handle real-world movement, companies like Dimensional appear to depend on human workers, even for jobs as simple as taking a robot for a walk.