Tony Zhao on Why Home Robots Could Unlock General Intelligence

Tony Zhao (0:00)

If we find a way to scale data and compute, we're able to solve robotics. But this is actually not everything. There's one missing piece here, which is like, where's the data?

You do not need a robot to collect data to train a robot. You can make a glove. And the data you collected from those cheap wearable devices works just as well. I think in robotics, there's a huge disconnect between a video and some system that actually works in the real world. That's the largest chasm that we as a whole industry needs to cross.

Brian Heater (0:31)

Much of the industry is saying, we're going to do industrial first, and then we'll look at the home. And you ended up in the home.

Tony Zhao (0:36)

If you think about homes, the same reason that makes it hard is the same reason that it will facilitate the right amount of intelligence that can actually adapt.

Brian Heater (0:45)

When people talk about the difficulty of the home and the timeline, much of the industry is putting it behind industrial tasks, like manufacturing. Is it possible that people are overstating the problems relative to other large scale robotics challenges?

Hello and welcome to another episode of Automated with Brian Heater. Coincidentally, my name is also Brian Heater. I am the managing editor at the Association for Advancing Automation. We have a very fun episode for you today with Tony Zhao of Sunday Robotics. It's a really interesting company in the humanoid space. Tony has some unique views on tackling unstructured environments like the home. I'm also going to put him on blast right now during this intro and remind him that he agreed to send me one of those robot heads. Thanks to Tony and Sunday. Thanks to you for tuning in. Don't forget to like, subscribe, review the show and check out our newsletter and news site over at automated.fm. Automated's next happy hour and live podcast recording are going to be in the Bay Area on Tuesday, September 22nd. We will be at Circuit Launch in Mountain View. Thanks to our friends at Silicon Valley Robotics for helping to set that up. More information and a link to sign up in the show notes. Now, please enjoy this episode of Automated.

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Mom and dad, I'm thinking of dropping out of Stanford to launch a robotics startup.

Tony Zhao (3:24)

So funny.

Brian Heater (3:26)

How did that conversation go?

Tony Zhao (3:31)

I'm glad you bring this up.

It was honestly, I need to, because I know this will happen, I need to prepare them for it month and month before it actually happened. So the day I talked to them about this, they're like, we see this coming, do whatever you want, you're kind of free. But I think I was actually advertising all the conversations for a few months.

Brian Heater (3:59)

So how do you set the stage for something like that?

Tony Zhao (4:04)

I think because I was really close with my parents when I was in college and in Ph.D. And I've been telling them what I saw in robotics. And I think for them, they also understand it's pretty clear that we're on an exponential path, that a lot of things that were previously thought to be impossible started to become possible. And they can get a sense that I'm feeling a little bit restless in academia, that I want to do things that is just not the best thing to do in academia, when the objective is mostly about publication, but not real products.

And I think they're also aware that me as a kid, I'm always the slightly reckless, slightly ambitious kind of kid, and so I think they're not super surprised as coming out of me.

Brian Heater (4:55)

Yeah, I know next to nothing, or actually nothing about your history prior to Stanford. So did you move out to California specifically to go to school?