Tesla loses some AI staff to a new robotics startup (www.businessinsider.com)

Sunday Robotics, a new home-robotics startup cofounded by Cheng Chi and former Tesla intern Tony Zhao, has publicly surfaced with a team that includes at least ten ex-Tesla engineers—several from the Optimus humanoid and Autopilot programs—and around 50 staff in total (including so-called “memory developers” who help train the robot). On Nov. 19 the company demoed Memo, a home robot shown performing tasks like picking up wine glasses, loading a dishwasher and folding socks, and announced ACT-1, a “robot foundation model” the company says was trained on zero robot data and claims enables ultra long-horizon tasks, zero‑shot generalization and advanced dexterity. Several named hires—who worked on Tesla’s high-profile Autopilot and Optimus efforts—underscore a notable transfer of autonomy and robotics talent from Tesla to startups. For the AI/ML community this matters for two reasons: talent and technology. The migration of experienced autonomy engineers may accelerate progress on real-world household robotics by transplanting know‑how in perception, control and large-model training, while Sunday’s ACT-1 claim (zero-robot-data training and zero-shot generalization) signals growing interest in robot foundation models that rely on simulation, synthetic data, or large-scale multimodal pretraining rather than hand-labeled robot datasets. If validated beyond demo videos, those techniques could change how roboticists approach long-horizon planning, generalization and dexterous manipulation—but the company’s claims remain preliminary and both Tesla and Sunday Robotics did not respond to requests for comment.