Dimensional, a San Francisco startup based in the Dogpatch neighborhood, posted an ad this month in a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook offering $20 an hour to walk robot dogs for four to six hours at a time, according to a New York Times report republished by The Star. The ad, since deleted, warned that walkers might have to carry an overheated robot, about 33 pounds, back to the office.

Founder Stash Pomichter, 26, said the company is building an open-source operating system that lets AI agents control robots. The human walkers steer the robots by remote while cameras and sensors record "ground truth" for navigating city sidewalks. The dogs are roughly $2,000 machines from China's Unitree; Pomichter said Dimensional has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots.

Comparing walks under human and AI control, he said, showed that "agents are still very bad at controlling hardware."