The robotics industry is on the cusp of its own “GPT” moment, catalyzed by transformative research advances. Enter Memo, the first general-intelligence personal robot, focused on taking on your chores to give back your time. Sarah Guo sits down with Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, co-founders of Sunday Robotics, to discuss the state of AI robotics. Tony and Cheng speak to the challenges they faced while developing their technology, the innovative glove system employed to scale real-world data collection, and the impact of diffusion policy and imitation learning. Plus, they talk about their 2026 in-home beta program and why personal robots are only a handful of years away from mass deployment.
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Chapters:
00:00 – Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi Introduction
00:56 – State of AI Robotics
02:11 – Deploying a Robot Pre-AI
03:13 – Impact of Diffusion Policy
04:29 – Role of ACT and ALOHA
07:02 – Imitation Learning - Enter UMI
10:38 – Introducing Sunday
11:57 – Sunday’s Robot Design Philosophy
15:05 – Sunday’s Shipping Timeline
19:02 – Scale of Sunday’s Training Data
23:58 – Importance of Data Quality at Scale
24:56 – Technical Challenges
27:59 – When Will People Have Home Robots?
30:48 – Failures of Past Demos
32:34 – Sunday’s Demos
36:53 – What Sunday’s Hiring For
39:10 – Conclusion
