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

28:57Yeah. It's just that I think if you want robots in the real world, in the open world, like you cannot, if else, all the things that can happen and trying to engineer that is kind of, you'll be kind of cursed if you try to enumerate other things that can go wrong. But the nice thing about data is that all of these, if and else, are somewhat included inside the data. So if we get very diverse, high-quality data and enough quantity of them, we don't actually need to do much real coding, but the neural network will learn from data, and that will end up being better. As someone who's very close to this stuff, Jeff, are you more or less optimistic than the average person about riding in a Waymo or Tesla self-driving?

29:45I own a Tesla. I self-drive to office every day. You used to work at Tesla, right? Yes, I did. I spent a summer there back in 2022. That was actually before the whole end-to-end scheme happening there, back when things are not working so well. These days, they work very well. I feel like I get more optimistic when seeing things that doesn't work and believing that it will go to like 99%. But going from that to Robotaxi that is fully, fully autonomous and can scalably be deployed in any place, I think people might have underestimated how much work there. So I think I'm more optimistic for always the first chunk of it.

30:36and the second leg is more challenging. If we could get a little more technical for a second, and robotics are in the brain for me, Tony, because today I interviewed Demis Asabas. You used to work at Deedmine, right? Yep. So Demis and then the CEO of Skilled AI, which just raised a big round and is doing robotics in the enterprise. And everyone is approaching it differently. But Demis and Patek from Skilled were saying, They think enterprise is the right way to attack this problem from a data perspective. It's interesting to see you do it from the home, going towards the consumer route. I'm curious how you landed on that as the way that you all were going to go versus just doing the more boring but stable, safe enterprise route.

31:27Yeah. So I think this is maybe a hot take, but I think there is a myth around like industrial automation or like in factories is an easier like thing for the robot to do. And that might be intuitive for people, right? There's more constraints, like there's clearly well-defined things that you should do. But I think the broader context here is more like if you want to do robotics, like pretty much everything is hard. Like 100 % of the things will be hard. And putting it in that context, I think the relative, like the hardness difference between going for industrial automation or going for like homes, I think is small in that perspective.

32:13And then I think the question becomes like, hey, are we really asking the right question of like trying to find things are easy because everything is hard. And what we end up with there is like, I think we just want to work on something that is really inspiring and exciting to people. And that will help us build the best team. And that will help us gather people who are truly excited about the mission and putting the actual work, putting all the ingenuities into making that a reality. So I think that's maybe the hot take here is in a green scheme of things, I think being like 20%, 30 % harder or easier really doesn't matter that much.

32:53And I think there is also a different viewpoint here when it comes to home versus like say factories. One of the big thesis we have is we believe robots will win on the availability before they win on the sheer productivity or the speed. So if you think about factory automations, you're essentially competing with hourly wage workers and essentially humans. and human hands are so perfect after like millions years of revolution and we're so intelligent and it's actually really hard to beat the throughput and the precision that human has but these are absolutely critical in factories because if you're slow like the whole line will be blocked by you and if your success rate is not high enough maybe you'll be damaging some parts And that's like causing real economic damages.

33:54Right. So if you think about it in that context, home actually becomes quite easy because the type of work that we need to do is not like rocket science. It's not like assembling an iPhone. It's essentially things that a six-year-old knows how to do. And it's one of the few places that you can provide a lot of value by maybe giving people a cup of water when they're tired and maybe refilling that water time over time, making sure it's always the perfect temperature and perfect volume there. The chores, they come every day. Every day there is new 30 minutes to an hour of chores getting invented in your homes.

34:36but you cannot just have a housekeeper to come in for like 30 minutes and you let them go right you either are like super rich and you have someone in your home the whole time they're your like housekeeper you pay like a full-time salary for that or you actually need to do it yourself and so the time we save becomes not like competing with a hourly wage worker but becomes your opportunity cost of like hey if every day after war you have like three hours you can spend and if you can save one more hour there is actually quite significant. So it becomes like almost like a labor arbitrage that if you're making more, the robot will be more useful to you earlier.

35:15And that allows us to kind of get into the market like gradually, as opposed to like, we're spot on competing with human dexterity, like from day one. I get so mad at people who have three hours after work every day, because clearly they don't have kids or they're super rich, as you said, and they have their own assistant or butler or something. I was like, I have approximately like 43 minutes of free time per day. And if I have some music on, you know, doing the dishes or whatever is not the worst thing in the world. But when that is very literally the time that I have to like read a book or play a game or spend the time with my wife, It's like that is very valuable time.

35:57And so I do see some need there. And I know the rumor is that Apple is working on something like this as well, right? Yeah, I think pretty much everyone is. If you look at the latest demos coming from Tesla, from Figure, it's all about the homes. Do you think we actually have robots in the homes of like everyday normal people, though, in the next even five years? I don't know, what you have is so well thought out. It's like the videos, the branding, the positioning, it really resonates. It's very intentional. Shout out, Ellis, I'm sure, for a lot of that too. But when do you think this actually shows up for people in a way that's cost-conscious, that's accessible, that's scalable?

36:46Yeah. So I think the way we think about it is that as the hardware costs get over and as the capability of the robot in terms of like the AI, the neural network, expand over time. Let's say in the beginning you can do one task, but over time you can do like a thousand tasks, right? I think the product itself is inevitable. That if it costs you a few thousand dollars and you can do all the chores in your home, I think everybody will want it, right? But then the question really becomes like, how can we get there? I think we all agree that the end goal is very clear. Can we get the cost down fast enough?

37:19can we get the AI capability to go up fast enough? So I think I would say like for us, we certainly believe that home robots will be in your neighbor's home, like maybe sooner than you think, definitely within the next five years. And we're actually running a beta program this year towards the end of it to be putting it in real people's homes. That's actually the thing that like really drives us as the team is that it's not 100 % sure yet. that is not like setting stone. So we're almost like driven by these like urgency to see how can we like optimize things a little bit better so we can get this out of the door like a little bit sooner.

38:01So I think it's part of the excitement that we have is that it's not clear yet.

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38:45Two years ago, Apple showed off a version of Siri that used AI to be more helpful, more intelligent, and just generally more awesome. And two years later, it hasn't shipped a bit and Siri is still terrible. But this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about how a new deal with Google could mean a totally new way of thinking about AI for Apple and that we might actually get good Siri. That, plus the latest on what's going on with Grok and what's going on inside the metaverse, how you can be more productive in 2026, and the surprisingly sci-fi future of LEGO. All that on The Verge Cast, wherever you get podcasts.

39:32The Neo launch was super interesting to me because, again, it was really good branding. The keynote was awesome. And then you realize it's like, oh, no, they want to charge you like$20 ,000 to do data collection in your home with a teleoperated robot. I don't know if that's your strategy, Tony, with Sunday. Sorry if it is. That's I think that's not going to work at scale. I think like you can sucker a few early adopters into doing that. But you have to have value and not like trick people into actually being the customer. Right. In a way that they don't know that they're the customer. You can buy the robot, but you're actually feeding the data back to the company, and that's the reason they're doing it.

40:14You're actually giving them more value than they're giving you. You don't want to do that, I assume, with Sunset. Yeah. I think for us, our opinion is it's not worth shipping a not-autonomous robot. The reality is when people think about robots, robots should be autonomous. It should be, by definition, autonomous. It's a robot. It's not like a human wearing the shirt of the robot. So I think what, but the reality is, right, like if we do not have data, like the AI isn't there. And without the AI, it will not be autonomous. So we have almost this like chicken and egg problem there. That without deployment, you cannot get a robot to be autonomous enough to be useful.

40:57So we were actually like thinking about this problem since the early days of like, how can we break this chicken and egg problems? And what we end up with is the whole idea of using gloves to collect data. So essentially, instead of getting a robot to your home and get someone else to log into your robot and collect data in your home, all we do is we build these gloves. I actually have one here. It's right here. It just gave us the finger. Thanks so much, Tony. So we have the hand actually here and the gloves. So the goal part here is that you actually don't have to use a whole robot to be generating data to train the robot.

41:38All you need is to wear these gloves and do the task, and we'll be able to, like, leverage that to train the robot. So what that allows us to do is we don't have to get data solely from our customers. Right now, we are actually having, like, more than 500 people in the U.S. as contractors. and it's part of their work to be like just wearing the glove and do the chores and we'll pay them for that. And that's how we train the robot without like needing to deploy it in the first place. How much are we paying for this? I mean, can you hook a brother up? I mean, I'm an entrepreneur now. I need some side income.

42:14I think they're actually paid very well. In terms of wall clock time, every hour they spend, they get paid like$40-ish, which is very good. and the additional nice thing, I think it's actually a very good job as in like you don't need to leave your home. You can just stay there and you can do it anytime. You can do it for like 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the afternoon and 10 minutes at night, right? And we don't control for that. All we need is to get like this amount of well-instructed, like, you know, clean data from your home, which brings us the diversity and the dexterity that's needed.

42:51Is that like an ongoing project in terms of the training or do you feel like at some point it's going to magically be done? That's a very good question. I think the gloves will be here to say we're going to be using it for a very long period of time just because if you think about places where AI works the best, it is when it has almost access to an unlimited amount of data. We have the whole internet to train the large language models and these ASP are still paying like Mercos, like scale, like crazy amount of money to label their data. I don't think robotics will be a kind of exception to that.

43:31And it's probably even in the other direction of like in robotics, we do not have a whole internet scale robot data to start with. So we have even more work that we need to do. So I think we need to like, yeah, like the data collectors and wear gloves. Gloves, we're expanding them actually quite a bit this year so that we can... Yeah, how many people are wearing gloves, doing dishes right at this very moment, do you think? And how do their wives feel about it? Sometimes both them and their wife do it together, which is... That's romance. That's 80 bucks an hour. yeah so uh at this point uh we have around like slightly above 500 people uh all in the u.s collecting data for us and we're going into the thousands this year yeah and i know there is the design of the product the brand uh some stuff on the software side i'm sure and how you interact with it but like what percent of your moat would you say is this data that you're collecting with the glove?

44:35Because I'm not sure that anybody else is doing that, are they? Yeah. So I think our approach of building a glove that is co-designed with a hand, I actually, I don't think I'm aware of any company that is doing something. I think there are similar approaches, but not exactly the same. Everyone in robotics talks about the hand as a problem, right? Like it's one of the top problems, but you're right. Like to my knowledge, no one is doing this as a data source like you are. How can that be?

45:30It's like, how can you get a lot of data for it? Like, without the data, the whole thing doesn't work, no matter how good the hand is, right? So what we do is... You can make a really nice fake video if you want. I feel like many have been accused of that in the last year. Yeah, I will not comment on that. Our videos. But I think it's actually more about like, instead of building the most dexterous hand and call it a day, and that's the optimization that we want to do. We're like, hey, can we build a hand that is capable, but we can also get a lot of data to unblock the AI part. So when we design the hand, it's actually not about like, hey, let's get the most amount of fingers out of it.

46:13Let's get five fingers. Let's get like 22, 27, whatever degree of freedoms and pack all the motors in. But can we design it like together with the glove? And the glove is something that people can wear and efficiently collect data. So I think when it comes to like for us in terms of the mode as a company, I actually think it's less about whatever data that we have because we're going to have so much more than that. But always approaching these problems with a global knowledge of like AI, of software, of hardware and like the whole thing together, like controls. And that kind of always steers us to making decisions that is slightly different from the rest of the field.

47:01And I think that will be the kind of the core competency that we'll continue to own and that will continue to help us make bets that are somewhat unpopular in the beginning, but are post-op obvious. Yeah. I mean, what can you tell us about the other stuff we've seen in the space? I know there's been different demos that kind of have or haven't been real visualizations of robots capabilities. I mean, does that bother you when you see that stuff? Like what type of stuff seems not real when you see it going viral on Twitter? The way I think about it right now is like videos are easy, but like uncut videos are slightly harder.

47:40But live demo is the boss and real deployment is the final boss. Right. it. So if you look at videos, like let it be from researchers or companies, it could be the one time that it works out of like a thousand tries. The success rate could literally be 1%. But as long as we can cherry pick one video, it looks like things work all the time, which is like not really true. But if we move along the spectrum and we see, for example, at CES, there are companies that are doing live demos in front of like hundreds and thousands of people and i think that's something that i respect a lot uh because that is when you have the true confidence to like show it in front of people as opposed to like uh like hedging it and be like hey uh as long as we get a video out we're all good here yeah did we miss you at ces yeah were you there we saw ping pong we saw they were they were boxing yep yeah it was cool it was cool well what what did that stuff is real and what is it i would say the ones that i saw that are at CES, namely like the for example ping pong, the boxing, and some of the like I think grasping objects from the shelf, I think they're all real.

48:57They're all to my knowledge driven by real AI. They're not like there's nobody, well the boxing one has someone like kind of remote controlling it but the controls of the like the fact that the robot is not falling down is autonomous and to my knowledge the all the autonomous demos of the like there's a folding a windmill and like taking photos with the dexterous hand those are all like real and autonomous yeah it can be tough to tell sometimes the outside looks shinier than than you know if you will how well the inside works i mean if you look at one of the ones that we saw at ces the unfortunately named lg cloyd kind of has a cute face i mean is that the one that looks like most similar to Memo.

49:41I'm not sure exactly what it can do or how it works, but it looks polished. And I think as the average person, you're like, oh, it certainly looks like it works. But I mean, are you basically telling us that without the GloVe data, some of these household chores just aren't possible yet for anybody else? I think for now, that totally seems to be the case. And I think I will have, it would change my mind if they're willing to live demo it like many, many times in front of the like the audience yeah speaking of memo is definitely a better name than cloyd imagine welcoming a guest to your house please come on in allow cloyd to serve us some amuse bush it sounds a little like uh i don't know like uh some evil things i mean the either summer is summer like actively going for the evil vibes or the transformers vibes like optimus or this or that.

50:38And like Optimus is going to fall over and squash your cat. Like Elon doesn't really seem to care about, you know, that stuff in the short term. But if you look at it, I mean, logically, the way that you design it shows you what its goal is. And when I look at some of the others, the goal is to look impressive. And I mean, I assume you guys looked at the legs and And you're like, oh, we don't need that unless we want to be vain about it. Yeah. And I think a lot is about really the safety. And if we want flashy demos, legs are great. They look like humans. But I think also people wouldn't disagree on the fact that if you look 10 years into the future, the robot may all have legs.

51:23We're all converging to that eventually. But I think the question is more about like, can we earn the trust of real consumers or other customers with whatever the robot that we're building right now? And that will give us the ticket to build that ultimate robot that is like, can do everything. And I think just prioritizing safety in almost like a passive way that like if we just unplug the robot's battery while he's doing something, it will not fall over, is going to be like helping us gain the trust so that people know that we consider those edge cases. Yeah, I saw on your site you have something called compliant control, which is that you could interrupt it and it won't just like fall over or this or that.

52:09How exactly does that work? Like, can you just kind of shoo its hand out of the way or how does that work? No more drinks for Alex. He's being cut off. I needed that tonight. I needed that tonight, guys. I think the idea there is like when the robot is doing certain things, right, it's actually delivering the hand to where it wants to be. But the rest of the body, let's say where your elbow is, doesn't have to be at the exact elbow position where it is right now. Let's say you have a kid and they bump into the robot. The robot shouldn't be there like rigid, but it should kind of tucked in and maybe like yield when someone hit it.

52:47So this is what we mean by compliance, that it is not like an industrial robot, that all it does is to follow the rigid instructions going from point A to point B, and no matter what you put in front of it, it will destroy it. That's not how we think a home robot should be. I think to achieve that is, again, a mix of very deep into the system side, that we need to choose the right hardware, and we need to build the right electrical system so that we can enable the hardware to be compliant. And then our model also need to consider that. So it's always like a complicated answer that involves other parts of the system that we need to like put in like right at the beginning.

53:27I think I need to upgrade my hardware because I break glasses and plates constantly, expensive ones. And I mean, it just makes you wonder like, are we going to see silverware forks, knives, plates, bowls specifically designed for robot? Robot friendly. Yeah. Yeah. Robot friendly. Or do we not have to worry about that because memo can handle your grandma's China just fine? I think that's a, that's a very good question of whether there exists like robot-friendly utensils or... OXO Good Grips, the most goaded brand in all of kitchens worldwide with those little rubber grips on them. I love that brand.

54:15Yeah. And I think maybe the broader question here is how can we... It's like when we deploy a robot into people's homes, I think the adaptation... Of course, the robot will adapt to how you live your life. But I think human will also adapt their behavior to the robot. For example, let's say you have a butter knife that is very thin. And for some reason, after you eat, you just really want to put it on a table. And it's just essentially flat with the table. And the robot really struggles to pick it up. And what you could do is keep doing this and the robot keeps struggling. Maybe it takes like five minutes to pick it up.

54:54But what you could also do is put it on top of a plate. and then it's infinitely easier for the robot to pick up without you actually intentionally trying to do things that are so different. So I think there will be things like this happening in the future that we will also kind of evolve our lifestyle a little bit in exchange for more convenience that a robot can bring us. For example, when you're choosing a new coffee machine and you realize there's one of them, the robot knows how to use, but the other one doesn't. And they maybe produce like a similar amount of like quality of coffee. And I think people will go for the ones that they can have the robot to do, right?

55:37So I think it's an exciting feature too for us as well is that we don't need to handle like a million types of coffee machines, but like only to handle the ones that are more popular and we can kind of change users' behavior a little bit by steering them into getting like the ones that works well. How long before we get to what you're talking about? I mean, I've asked before, like, when are these going to be in homes? But is this like a 10 year vision? Is this a five year vision? Like, how far out are we from this actually, in your mind? Yeah, it's definitely less than five years. Really? Yep.

56:15Wow. Because if you think about where are the fundamental bottleneck is, it's data. Like, I think I'll put another hot take here is I don't think robotics, like training AI to do households, right, is fundamentally harder than like math Olympiads or like all the crazy reasoning models that we see right there. In terms of the fundamental AI architecture, I think the rest of the fields, like large language models or vision, are actually quite ahead. And the only reason that the robots cannot do their chores right now is the lack of data. That is almost like the singular biggest bottleneck that is hurting progress.

56:59Because without the data, you cannot put in, like, do very meaningful research to iterate on figuring out what are the right methods and figuring out all the science questions. We're just blocked there. But once we're able to unblock the data part, I think the capability will be more like an exponential growth than we're stuck somewhere. So that's how we think about it. It's all about the data. And we want to get as much data, as diverse data as possible. And you think the best way to get the data is the hand versus just training on videos of humans interacting with the real world or how Elon talks about FSD is the way that you're going to learn for optimists.

57:41Everyone has a theory of how to get the training data right now, right? And yours is a very unique one. I have to give it to you. I haven't seen anyone else approach it that way. And you obviously have conviction that that is the way. And I'm curious, you probably evaluated all the other ones. Are all the other ones just dead ends? I don't think that's how I'll put it. I think it's true that right now, I think robotics is still at the fun part that people are debating. And these days in large language models, people don't debate about whether you need training. They're like, give me money. I'll give you the corresponding results.

58:18There's a fun part that people disagree that there are many fun ideas. People are trying to combat each other with narratives, essentially. but given the amount of information and the concrete evidences that we saw we think dealing with gloves like collect the data transfer into the robot is the best way but this is not it's a strong opinion that is i would say like weakly held as in if there is another breakthrough that we see that changes some of the assumptions we're more than willing to like update our prior and figure out how to best leverage that right and that can come in a lot of different flavors let's say world models that people talk a lot about these days.

59:03It could be simulation. It could be like anything. But the piece that will never change, in my opinion, is like real high quality data. And that is going to be the concrete thing that we'll have either way that will differentiate us, no matter what the downstream algorithm is. Let it be like training the robot directly with like reinforcement learning, with imitation learning or more models. I think we're largely open-minded about how to use it. And in five years, do you have a sense of what market it's going to hit in first? I mean, I feel like intuitively I would think, you know, elderly folks like people who have the most trouble with the chores and may need it most.

59:47Is that your instinct as well? Well, for the early customers, we do think there will be a period of time, especially in the beginning, that the robot will give them more trouble than it helps. Right. And in the beginning, maybe it's like you need to learn how to do things in a way that the user wants and it might make mistakes. So I would say when it comes to the early customers that we'll be addressing, I don't think we'll be aiming at people who like almost like desperately or like have to use it. But we'll start with people that the robot is very nice to have, but, you know, just elevates their standard of living by a lot.

1:00:33so I don't think we'll be going for like elderly care from day one but that's eventually the goal for sure what's the robo narrative at Davos Alex oh my god I mean it's all like jobs you know it's like this is yeah this is such a different group than uh what we normally talk about on the podcast But I do think everyone's like, oh, you know, if robotics really hits and there's millions of these robots out in the world, you know, these are a bunch of policy folk. Like, how's that going to impact hiring and GDP growth and all these things? And I don't know, everyone in tech that's building this stuff seems to think that it's actually going to be an accelerant for everything, that it's not going to hurt economies, but it will free up more people, you know, to do things that they want to do.

1:01:25or just create net new jobs. So yeah, there's a lot of dueling narratives and dueling viewpoints. But I think everybody agrees that robotics is at an inflection point, right? And that seems to be the consensus here for sure. And Tony, I assume you agree with that. You wouldn't be doing this company if you weren't believing that. But yeah, how do you feel about the jobs piece of it? Do you feel like we're going to find different kinds of jobs, more fulfilling kinds of jobs that get taken away, you know, from robots? Or how does that work? Yeah, sure. I think the whole mission for us is to give people time back so that they can enjoy, they can spend time with their families, they can spend time with their interests, right?

1:02:11And I think there's almost like a, like, not human part of doing chores that is so repetitive, that is so boring. It doesn't highlight what makes us unique as humans. But at the same time, I think it's like because of our positioning and the current type of work that we want to tackle is really not going to replace anyone's job at all. It's all about like saving people's time because they need to do it themselves. Right. We're replacing like software engineers time to do like chores as opposed to people who really need to to feed their families, to do like housekeeping. I don't think we're touching their unique proposition at all.

1:02:58Because, again, it might be funny to say, but we as a robotics company, we do not bet against human dexterity because it's so good. And we always find a place that we can complement them as opposed to replacing them. because like from hardware, software, AI, we're not close in terms of getting like a human hand, let's say. That's why people are talking about it. Like the hand is the bottleneck, right? Yeah. Yeah, I wonder what simple chore do you now have the most respect for after digging into the hand dexterity or otherwise? It's like, oh man, cleaning a toilet, unbelievable skill. Yeah, I think even just using like shirt folding as an example, right?

1:03:46We can fold these shirts in the midair. We fold it in a very dynamic way. We like fling it, we use our hand to like kind of tuck it in. And these are things that are very hard to learn for the robots. I think I definitely come to appreciate that more, like as we work on these tasks. The other thing, like as I said, for bathroom cleaning, there are like harsh chemicals. that we really don't want to get to the robot, right? It might, like, there are beautiful paints on it. If it got, like, the bleaches on it, it will not look great. And so when there are, like, I think when there are, you need to interface with very harsh chemicals and you need to apply a high amount of force, those are still, like, I think remains very difficult for the mechanical side.

1:04:37Just had a vision of somebody walking into my apartment, me saying, sorry, guys, my Cloyd is covered in shit. I gotta go wash him off. Oh, God. Maybe we should have been there. Oh, Cloyd. Well, Tony, thanks for joining us, man. It's been great to reconnect after all this time. And yeah, super fun to see what y 'all are building. I mean, it's just, you know, there's so many problem statements in tech that either, I mean, there's so many reasons things can be weird, whether it is someone who just comes straight from business school versus a researcher like yourself who spent, you know, a decade on this stuff or just attacking problems that just kind of don't really need to be solved quite yet.

1:05:19But I think we could all agree chores are annoying. So nice to have someone doing that on the show. For sure. Good to meet you, Tony. Yeah. Great to see you guys. Yeah. Enjoyed it.

1:05:35that's it for this week's show thanks tony for coming on the podcast and alex for staying up late i know you have very important people to be meeting with so uh thanks for giving us your time no one is important as you alice always uh don't forget to like subscribe everywhere you get your podcasts we're access.show too we have a website and you can find us in video at accesspod on YouTube. You are so quickly fading, Alex. It's hilarious. It's obvious that you've been in like back-to-back meetings for like the last 16 hours. And if you like this episode, please leave a five-star review or thumbs up and share with a friend on the internet or in your local Swiss village.

1:06:17You can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at Meaning.Company. You can find my newsletter at Sources.News. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Hooked creators. Bye-bye. Bye.