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Tesla\u2019s AI and robotics divisions are facing a significant \u201cbrain drain\u201d as a stealth startup called Sunday Robotics emerges with a roster of engineers from Tesla\u2019s Optimus and Autopilot teams.<\/p>\n
We are used to seeing Tesla executives leave, especially to other AI giants, as the competition ramps up and large compensation packages are being thrown around left and right.<\/p>\n
However, this feels different. Sunday Robotics isn\u2019t a Fortune 500 company poaching Tesla engineers with big packages. It is a tiny startup that just came out of stealth with a funding round that would be a rounding error in Tesla\u2019s financials.<\/p>\n
Sunday Robotics officially emerged from stealth today, announcing $35 million in funding led by Benchmark and Conviction.<\/p>\n
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The startup, founded by Stanford roboticists Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi (Zhao previously interned at Tesla Autopilot), has recruited an impressive bunch of senior Tesla engineering leadership. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The list of departures includes:<\/p>\n
Nishant Desai: an almost 5-year veteran at Tesla\u2019s machine learning team working on Autopilot and FSD.<\/p>\n
Nadeesha Amarasinghe: The former Engineering Lead for AI Infrastructure at Tesla. He was responsible for the massive backend systems that train FSD and Optimus. He was at Tesla for moer than 7 years.<\/p>\n
Perry Jia: A key engineer on the Optimus and Autopilot programs. He spent almost 6 years at Tesla and led the data engine programs. Now, he leads Data Operations at Sunday.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t just random attrition. Sunday Robotics has effectively poached a \u201cfull stack\u201d of robotic and AI engineers from Tesla.<\/p>\n
They also recruited other employees from Tesla, and it wouldn\u2019t be surprising to see more join, as Jason Peterson, a talent recruiter for Tesla\u2019s Optimus and Robotaxi programs, confirmed that he also left Tesla in September to join Sunday.<\/p>\n
What is Sunday Robotics?<\/p>\n
So, what are these engineers leaving Tesla to build?<\/p>\n
Sunday Robotics is taking a different path than Tesla\u2019s general-purpose humanoid. Their debut robot, Memo, is a wheeled domestic robot designed for household chores such as cleaning dishes and folding laundry. \u00a0<\/p>\n
By ditching the legs (Optimus is bipedal), Sunday claims they can focus entirely on dexterity and reliability. The robot is trained on a massive dataset of 10 million behavioral episodes, which the company claims gives it a \u201cChatGPT moment\u201d for physical movement. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The most interesting technical divergence from Tesla is how Sunday collects data.<\/p>\n
Tesla relies heavily on VR teleoperation suits to train Optimus. Operators wear motion-capture suits and mimic tasks in a lab. It\u2019s high-fidelity, but it\u2019s slow and expensive. Tesla now claims to also train just on video.<\/p>\n
Sunday Robotics has a different approach this with a $200 \u2018Skill Capture Glove\u2019. They distributed these gloves to hundreds of ordinary people (\u201cMemory Developers\u201d) who recorded themselves doing chores in their own messy homes. \u00a0<\/p>\n
This allowed Sunday to crowdsource 10 million episodes of real-world data, messy kitchens, weird lighting, and cats jumping on counters at a fraction of the cost of Tesla\u2019s teleoperation labs.<\/p>\n
The gloves also reflect Memo\u2019s much less complicated hands, which can make them more reliable and cheaper.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Electrek\u2019s Take<\/p>\n
Elon Musk is telling anyone willing to listen that Tesla is ahead of the competition when it comes to \u201creal-world AI\u201d and robotics.<\/p>\n
He claims that Tesla will start producing Optimus robots in the millions of units starting next year and it will eventually \u201cend poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not many people who are serious about robotics take these claims seriously.<\/p>\n
Many other companies are developing humanoid robots, and Tesla shows no evidence of being ahead of the pack, while there are still many obstacles to make them useful at scale.<\/p>\n
A company like Sunday has a less ambitious but more realistic approach that could pay off, and it is convincing some Tesla engineers to jump ship.<\/p>\n
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