A video went viral in India about a month ago appearing to show a vast number of garment workers wearing tiny, head-mounted cameras while they worked in a dreary-looking factory. A widespread hunch was the technology the video depicted was a system for what’s known as egocentric data collection—gathering first-person footage of people in action to train AI models, in order to replace the workers with robots. But it wasn’t totally clear if the video was real, let alone if the footage would or could be used to replace the workers.
That remains unconfirmed, but a different company called Human Archive has just raised $8.2 million from “Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, and angels from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery, BAIR, SAIL, Brad Boa, and Meta,” according to TechCrunch, and it’s doing something remarkably similar to what’s rumored to be happening in the viral video. The investment confirms, at the very least, that Silicon Valley has some faith in technologies like this. Human Archive doesn’t appear to mount cameras on the heads of factory workers specifically, but the rest, it appears, is about right. In a YouTube video created by Human Archive’s leadership, one co-founder, Rushil Agarwal explains that the company attaches cameras to workers in “residential homes, restaurants, hotels, construction sites, logistics, and industrial environments worldwide.” TechCrunch reports that Human Archive is operating 1,000 of these pieces of hardware. TechCrunch points to gig economy platforms in India as the partner companies whose workers are wearing the headsets, although it notes that Human Archive hasn’t named any specific companies. Human Archive is headquartered, it says, in China and San Francisco.
