AI for sweatshops? YC startup gets flamed for now-deleted product demo
Y Combinator, the startup incubator helmed by Garry Tan, has deleted a video demo after it was slammed online as dystopian surveillance software for sweatshops.
In the video, made by the startup Optifye.ai, founders Kushal Mohta and Vivaan Baid reenact managing a factory through a color-coded dashboard that’s linked to cameras monitoring workers.
Baid identifies a worker causing a bottleneck as “No. 17” and berates the person through the dashboard for underperforming.
The video generated immediate criticism and debate.
“Leave it to a bunch of children who’ve never worked a real job for a single day in their lives — and still haven’t graduated college — to come up with some obnoxious slave driving dystopian shit like this,” Christopher Amidon, the founder of Subsea Robotics, wrote on X. Another user wrote: “YC promoted a demo … for slavery?”
Vedant Nair, a founder who went through Y Combinator, struck a different tone. “1) YC sweatshop computer vision demo was in bad taste 2) Software like this already exists, is being used, and factory managers want this,” he wrote on X.
Toward the end of every Y Combinator term, the incubator releases video demos from startups in the cohort. Optifye.ai’s video has been deleted from YC’s X account. The company bills itself as an AI performance monitoring system for factory workers that “uses computer vision to tell supervisors who’s working and who’s not in real-time,” according to its Y Combinator webpage.
“The shop floor has historically been a black box,” the description reads. “With Optifye, manufacturing companies can now accurately measure worker output and make decisions that boost line efficiency by up to 30%.”
Baid and Mohta wrote that they were motivated to start the company by their family businesses in India.
“Because our families run manufacturing companies, we’ve seen more assembly lines than most industrial engineers!” the founders wrote.
Both founders’ LinkedIn profiles say they began working on the company last July and expect to graduate from Duke University in May.
Baid wrote in his Y Combinator bio that he’s been “around assembly lines for as long as I can remember” and is using his “expertise in computer vision to solve a manufacturing company owner’s biggest problem: low labor productivity!”
Mohta wrote that his family runs “several manufacturing plants in various industries,” giving him “unrestricted access to assembly lines” since he was 15.
The company is advised by YC group partner Brad Flora, an entrepreneur and former journalist. Companies Flora has worked with are worth a combined $34 billion, according to his YC bio.
On YC news site Hacker News, a user named latexr called Optifye.ai “a dystopian company backed by Y Combinator.”
“They’re using AI to further dehumanize and abuse individual factory workers and treat them like disposable automatons. … They also display a profound lack of empathy by bragging about lowering stress for rich company owners, which they do by increasing the stress of everyone who works for them,” latexr wrote.
A person claiming to be a manufacturer wrote on Hacker News that the founders “merely translated existing practices into a piece of software. While the demo was a little off, the pain point is pretty valid.
“I don’t believe in running a sweatshop, but even well run humane factories have to battle inefficiencies all the time,” the user added.
Baid, Mohta, Flora, and representatives of YC did not respond to requests for comment.
204
