Tesla Engineers Transition to New Robotics Start-Up Amid AI Talent Drain

Tesla's AI and robotics divisions are experiencing a significant brain drain as engineers transition to a new startup called Sunday Robotics. This emerging company has successfully recruited a roster of talent from Tesla's Optimus and Autopilot teams, marking a notable trend in the tech sector's competitive landscape for skilled professionals.

Unlike previous departures of Tesla executives to large AI firms with lucrative compensation packages, Sunday Robotics is a small startup that has recently raised $35 million in funding led by Benchmark and Conviction.

The startup was co-founded by Stanford roboticists Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, with Zhao having previously interned at Tesla Autopilot. Among the notable engineers who have made the switch are Nishant Desai, who worked on Tesla's machine learning team for nearly five years, Nadeesha Amarasinghe, the former Engineering Lead for AI Infrastructure at Tesla, and Perry Jia, a key engineer on the Optimus and Autopilot programs who now leads Data Operations at Sunday.

Jason Peterson, a talent recruiter for Tesla's Optimus and Robotaxi programs, also confirmed his departure to join Sunday Robotics in September. Sunday Robotics aims to take a different approach than Tesla's general-purpose humanoid robot, Optimus.

Their debut robot, Memo, is designed as a wheeled domestic robot capable of performing household chores like cleaning dishes and folding laundry. By opting out of legs, the company focuses on enhancing dexterity and reliability.

Sunday Robotics claims they have trained Memo using a dataset of 10 million behavioral episodes, which they assert provides a 'ChatGPT moment' for physical movement. A significant divergence from Tesla's methods is how Sunday collects training data.

While Tesla has relied on VR teleoperation suits for high-fidelity training in controlled environments, which is both slow and expensive, Sunday employs a $200 Skill Capture Glove distributed to ordinary people, referred to as Memory Developers.

These individuals record themselves performing chores in their homes, allowing Sunday to gather real-world data at a fraction of the cost. This crowdsourced data includes varied environments like messy kitchens and unusual lighting conditions.

The gloves also reflect Memo's simpler hand design, potentially making it more reliable and cost-effective. Despite Elon Musk's claims that Tesla is ahead in real-world AI and robotics, skepticism remains within the robotics community regarding the actual progress of Tesla's humanoid robots.

Many experts believe Tesla faces significant challenges to produce functional humanoid robots at scale, while Sunday Robotics adopts a more practical approach that could yield better results. The shift of engineers from Tesla to Sunday Robotics exemplifies the ongoing migration of tech talent within the robotics and AI sectors, emphasizing the intense competition for skilled professionals in this rapidly evolving field.