How India Is Training the Robots of the Future

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (0:09)

On top of a mountain of discarded plastic, a 43-year-old woman named Sunita Rathore is hard at work. She's in a bright yellow sari with green glass bangles sifting through piles of litter, plastic waste which she'll sort and clean for recycling.

Sunita is based in New Delhi, but scenes like this one take place every day all over India, on construction sites, in homes, and recycling plants where manual labor is done. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for one thing.

Saritha Rai (0:43)

Suddenly you saw this high-tech contraption on her forehead, an iPhone.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (0:48)

An iPhone strapped to her head, recording every move she makes.

Saritha Rai covers tech in India for Bloomberg. She met Suneeta at a recycling plant earlier this year. Suneeta has spent years sorting and cleaning discarded plastic for about $200 a month. Usually, the factories where she works are lively places.

Saritha Rai (1:10)

There's a lot of banter. There's a lot of conversation. There's a lot of silliness that goes on. But in this, it was deathly quiet because all these women were not allowed to talk to each other.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (1:21)

Eight hours a day in total silence. But that's not all.

Saritha Rai (1:26)

She was hunched forward constantly because she was not allowed to capture any other part of her body except her wrist. It's exactly what a humanoid robot's camera would see if it looked dumb. That was the motion she was asked to capture.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (1:44)

Sunita doesn't know what the footage is for. All she knows is that this phone recording earned her extra money, money she uses to send her four kids to school.

But the recordings she and her fellow workers make are critical to the future of AI and robotics. They'll be fed into AI systems to teach humanoid robots how to move and navigate the physical world, like us, one frame at a time.

Saritha Rai (2:11)

The goal really is to capture the micro gestures, really tiny hand movements that robots need to learn to become better at everyday tasks.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (2:24)

The world has started to embrace chatbots and agentic AI systems like Claude or chatGBT, which rely on cloud computing or local hardware to run. You give an AI agent a voice, text prompt or task, it gives you an answer.

For years, the robotics industry has tried to create humanoid devices, AI that moves in the physical world the same way that we do. When it's gone well, it's been dazzling.

Wang Xingxing (2:55)

OK. We have a new world record.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (3:00)

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing last month, essentially an Olympics for machines, a Chinese robot shattered the 100-metre sprint record. It's time, 8.64 seconds, nearly a full second faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest man on earth.

But step outside that sterile, controlled track and it's a completely different story.

Saritha Rai (3:26)

When robots come into the real world, there's invariably a blooper reel waiting. The texture of real life, the unevenness of perhaps the terrain, the spatial intelligence that's required for these robots. All of these things make it really difficult for robots to be trained in the lab. They have to be trained in the real world with real world data, which is where all of these data collectors come in.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (3:56)

Citigroup projects the market for human-like robots could reach $7 trillion by 2050 And to learn how to perform tasks like a human, robots need huge amounts of so-called egocentric data, footage captured directly through the eyes of a person.

China has been the biggest generator of that data, but it's keeping it within its borders. So the demand has shifted to the world's most populous country.

Saritha Rai (4:27)

So India really has become the epicenter of data collection in the past few months. Tens of thousands of workers like Saritha are shoe factory workers, denim factory workers, construction workers. All kinds of people have been recruited to record these first-person camera footage, what is called egocentric footage. It was a sort of unsettling moment for me when I talked to these workers because most of them were recording themselves into their own job extinction.

Rebecca Choong Wilkins (5:06)

Welcome to the Big Take Asia from Bloomberg News. I'm Rebecca Choong Wilkins in Forwaha. Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies, and the markets tycoons and businesses that drive this ever-shifting region. Today on the show, why the road to the next AI breakthrough runs through India, and what this race for human data means for the U.S.-China tech rivalry.