By Richard Nieva
Publication Date: 2026-04-23 21:29:00
Google is partnering with Mill, a company that makes a high tech trash bin, to train AI algorithms that can identify food scraps.
Courtesy Mill
In modern Silicon Valley, free food for employees is pretty much table stakes, but when Google started offering it more than two decades ago, it was a new and opulent perk. Now, the tech giant is doing something novel with the stuff employees don’t eat: it’s training AI.
On Thursday, Google announced a partnership with Mill — maker of a $1000 “smart” trash bin — to use a dataset Google created from its own food waste, which it labeled and annotated years ago for computer vision research. Under the terms of the deal, Mill will also get early access to unreleased versions of Google’s flagship Gemini AI models, as well as a team of its AI engineers and researchers.
Mill is the second startup from Matt Rogers, a Nest cofounder who joined Google after the company bought Nest in 2014. He left and co-founded Mill in 2020 with a…