No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:10:38 · Sarah Guo, Tony Zhao
[00:10:38] S1: And then you guys... You decided to start a company pushing this cart around Stanford. Tell me about that decision, and congratulations on the launch and and sort of the the direction and team you've built. [00:10:48] S0: Yeah. It's a it's a very interesting journey. I remember in the beginning, it's actually two of us in Cheng's apartment. On his desk, we were, like, clamped a robot there and tried to do some tasks, and it soon becomes, like, I think, an eight person team towards the end of twenty twenty four. And now we're at around, like, 30 to 40 people. We're not the best at everything. Right? But starting a company allows us to find people who we really love working with and then bring all the expertise together from mechanical engineering, supply chain, like, software engineering, like, controls, and to build a system together that is not like a demo, but a real product. [00:11:27] S1: You've built this amazing team. What are people actually signing up for? What's the mission of Sunday? [00:11:31] S0: Yes. It is to put a home robot in everyone's home. I think there are a lot of AIs trying to make you more efficient during the work, but there is not enough AI that actually helps you with all these mundane things that are not creative, that really has nothing to do with what's making us more intensely human. What's ideal for people to spend more time on is actually with their hobbies, with their passions, as opposed to spending more time doing chores.
00:11:31 · Tony Zhao, Sarah Guo
[00:11:31] S0: Yes. It is to put a home robot in everyone's home. I think there are a lot of AIs trying to make you more efficient during the work, but there is not enough AI that actually helps you with all these mundane things that are not creative, that really has nothing to do with what's making us more intensely human. What's ideal for people to spend more time on is actually with their hobbies, with their passions, as opposed to spending more time doing chores. [00:11:56] S1: So if you guys are going from these amazing research breakthroughs to we're actually gonna ship a home robot, that's a product you have to talk about. Cost and capability and robustness. Like, what's the design philosophy? [00:12:11] S0: As these AI models becomes more capable and as hardware cost continues to go down, the home robots or all kinds of robots will be everywhere. So if we start from the most surface level, which is design of the robots, when we design it, we think about what should the robot look like if it is ubiquitous. You need to see it every single day. What should it look like? And what we end up with is that we really think the robot should have a face. It should have a cute face, and it should be very friendly. So instead of, like, a terminator doing your dishes, we want the robot to feel like it's out of a cartoon movie. And then the huge decision is, like, how many arms should a robot have? Should it have, like, four arms? Should it have, like, one arms? Should it have legs? Should it have, like, five fingers, two fingers, three fingers? It's a huge space.
00:12:11 · Tony Zhao, Sarah Guo
[00:12:11] S0: As these AI models becomes more capable and as hardware cost continues to go down, the home robots or all kinds of robots will be everywhere. So if we start from the most surface level, which is design of the robots, when we design it, we think about what should the robot look like if it is ubiquitous. You need to see it every single day. What should it look like? And what we end up with is that we really think the robot should have a face. It should have a cute face, and it should be very friendly. So instead of, like, a terminator doing your dishes, we want the robot to feel like it's out of a cartoon movie. And then the huge decision is, like, how many arms should a robot have? Should it have, like, four arms? Should it have, like, one arms? Should it have legs? Should it have, like, five fingers, two fingers, three fingers? It's a huge space. [00:13:03] S1: Why is that the obvious answer it should just be, like, a full human arm?
00:13:03 · Sarah Guo, Tony Zhao, Cheng Chi
[00:13:03] S1: Why is that the obvious answer it should just be, like, a full human arm? [00:13:07] S0: I think the core motivation for us is how can we build a useful robot as soon as possible. So whenever we see something that we can accelerate it with simplification, we'll go simplify that. So one example of that is the hand that we designed, which has three fingers. We kind of combine the three of the fingers that we have together. Mhmm. And the reasoning there is just that most of the time when we use those fingers, we use it together. Let it be, like, grasping a handle, let it be opening the dishwasher. So it really doesn't make sense to add the cost, like, multiply by three x to have separated into three when we can do one with most of the benefits. So this is how we think about the whole robot as well. It's kind of with the constraint that we're building a general purpose robot that can eventually do all your chores and will simplify everything we possibly can so that the robot can be as low cost and as easy to repair as possible. [00:14:03] S2: Yeah. I just wanna add a little bit more to the actuator and, like, mechanical design. Traditionally, most robots are designed for industrial use cases. Uh-huh. And the robot are very fast, they are very stiff, and they were precise. The reason is because all the industrial robots are blind, so they're blindly following a trajectory that's programmed by someone. [00:14:21] S1: It's not reaction to perception Correct.
00:14:21 · Sarah Guo, Cheng Chi
[00:14:21] S1: It's not reaction to perception Correct. [00:14:24] S2: But because of the breakthrough we had in AI, now a robot has eyes, so it can actually correct its own mechanical and hardware inaccuracies. So that kinda opened up a new different space of design. [00:14:37] S1: Intuitively, it should be like, I can't tell you exactly what the distance is that you're on a millimeter scale, but I'm gonna get to the cup because I could stop. [00:14:45] S2: Yeah. Exactly. So that allows us to use these low cost actuators that's cheap, that's compliant, but they're imprecise. But because of the AI's algorithms and systems we build, it allows us to build robots that's mechanically inherently safe and compliant while simultaneously be able to achieve the sufficient accuracy we need for the home tasks. [00:15:05] S1: Where are we in that timeline? You said we're between GPT and ChatGPT. And so, like, when do consumers get ChatGPT, and when will you guys ship something?
00:15:05 · Sarah Guo, Tony Zhao
[00:15:05] S1: Where are we in that timeline? You said we're between GPT and ChatGPT. And so, like, when do consumers get ChatGPT, and when will you guys ship something? [00:15:14] S0: Yeah. It's actually a really exciting time because, like, we have so many prototypes internally. What we will do next year, 2026, is actually start doing beta programs. We'll have these robots, all kinds of different ones, into people's home and see how they react to it. That will be when we learn the most about, like, how people... Like, do you want to talk to a robot? Do people want to have their robots maybe teach their kids some new knowledge about the world? And this will inform us what the eventual product should look like. Internally, we just have a extremely high standard of what is the minimal consumer product we want to ship. It needs to be extremely safe. It needs to be extremely capable and low cost. [00:15:58] S1: Do you feel like you know something now that you didn't when you started the company?