Home robots are coming faster than you think, with Sunday's Tony Zhao

22 Jan · 67 min

Key points

Sunday Robotics pays 500+ U.S. contractors $40/hour to wear gloves and do household chores, training its Memo robot.
Tony Zhao says home robots will be in homes in under five years, with a beta later this year.
Thinking Machines raised ~$1B seed, but two cofounders and six people left back to OpenAI.

Funding and deals

Thinking Machines. Mira Murati's foundational AI research lab raised around $1bn in seed funding, which Alex Heath calls the largest seed round in tech history.

Guest interviews

Tony Zhao, co-founder of Sunday Robotics. Zhao says the biggest bottleneck is data, not a fundamental AI limit, and Sunday pays more than 500 US contractors about $40 an hour to wear its Memory Glove and collect chore data, growing to the thousands this year. He expects home robots in homes in under five years, with a beta later this year, and says robots win on availability before productivity because factories compete with human dexterity. He calls live demos the boss and deployment the final boss.

News

Thinking Machines loses two cofounders. Two cofounders and about six employees out of a team of 40 to 50 left Mira Murati's lab, and all came from OpenAI and went back there. Alex Heath says AI researchers now trade like NBA athletes and predicts consolidation among frontier labs.
Davos says robotics has hit an inflection point. Alex Heath says everyone at Davos agrees robotics is at an inflection point. Policy people there ask how robots will affect hiring and GDP growth, while tech people say they will create net new jobs.
Apple rumored to be building a home robot. Ellis Hamburger says the rumor is that Apple is working on a home robot, while Tony Zhao says pretty much every robotics company is now chasing the home, pointing to recent Tesla and Figure demos.
Neo launch draws skepticism over $20,000 price. Alex Heath says the Neo home robot launch had great branding, but he doubts that charging $20,000 for a teleoperated robot to collect data in your home will work at scale.
Davos is all AI, all week. Alex Heath, at his first World Economic Forum, says everything in Davos is about AI, discussed largely by people who do not know how AI works. He watched Anthropic's Dario Amodei speak and interviewed Google's Demis Hassabis for Sources.