I have spent more time than is healthy lately watching a hatted robot fold laundry. Sunday Robotics recently released this video of its ACT-2 Memo spending three hours folding laundry, and it is oddly compelling, a kind of visual ASMR.
Once you get past its more hypnotic aspects, however, there are important takeaways that speak to how AI is evolving.
Here are a few of the most important implications:
- Cheap vision is an unlock.
- Much like with cars, throwing more cheap cameras at the problem makes the problem more tractable.
- Memo has cameras in each hand, and one under its hat brim, at minimum, making for easier image acquisition and control.
- The bitter lesson applies
- Rich Sutton's argument that data and compute matter more than clever algorithms and sensors.
- Ever-cheaper general models are increasingly pushing aside special-purpose, task-specific robots.
- Anthropic recently showed this in a demo, and Sunday seems built around the same principle.
- Robotics is crossing from demos into deployable reliability.
- Sunday reports 99.1% success across 785 folds, multiple garment types and unfamiliar homes, without deployment-specific retraining.