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Co-founder and CEO @sundayrobotics. Stanford PhD dropout, ex Deepmind, Tesla, GoogleX

952 following35k followers

The Innovator

Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, a Stanford PhD dropout with pedigree from DeepMind, Tesla, and GoogleX who turns cutting-edge research into viral product-grade demos. He launches ambitious robot foundation models and open-source hardware that bridge lab-level ideas and real-world tinkering. His timeline mixes deep technical credibility with startup hustle and show-stopping demos.

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Stanford PhD dropout turned CEO, Tony’s resume reads like a sci‑fi credits reel because apparently finishing one degree was too slow when you could start three companies and tweet about all of them. His robots can plate a meal, but he still needs the internet to validate his commit messages.

Launching ACT-1, a frontier robot foundation model with massive zero-shot capabilities, and getting widespread attention (multi-million views on launch threads), plus shipping Mobile ALOHA as an accessible open-source hardware project.

To democratize advanced robotics by building foundation models and affordable, open-source manipulators that make robots more general, dexterous, and useful in everyday life, accelerating real-world deployment of capable robots.

Believes in open-source engineering, rigorous empirical results, fast iteration, and sharing work publicly to accelerate the field. He trusts that large-scale compute and ambitious engineering can shortcut traditional slow academic cycles and that great demos recruit collaborators faster than papers alone.

Technical authority combined with storytelling, he can both build state-of-the-art robot models and package results into clear, viral announcements. Strong network (DeepMind/Tesla/GoogleX), successful open-source releases, and proven ability to mobilize engineers and attention.

Can skew highly technical and assume audience expertise, which risks alienating non-specialists; tends to prioritize ambitious engineering slogs that can delay community-facing content; occasional hype-y framing that invites skeptical pushback.

On X, lean into short demo clips and behind-the-scenes threads: 1) Post 30, 60s vertical demo videos (no heavy jargon) with a one-line hook. 2) Follow each demo with a technical deep-dive thread that ends with a TL;DR and repo link. 3) Run monthly ‘Build with ALOHA’ highlights and retweet community projects to build contributors. 4) Host regular AMAs/Spaces after major releases and pin the best thread. 5) Share failure moments and incremental wins, authenticity converts curious followers into collaborators.

Fun fact: Tony’s team produced ACT-1 after a 3-month, 16-H100-node grind, and one tweet announcing the model pulled ~2 million views. He also shipped Mobile ALOHA, an open-source mobile manipulator, and repeatedly frames high-effort projects as opportunities to make robotics accessible (and tweetable).

Top tweets of Tony Zhao

Today, we present a step-change in robotic AI @sundayrobotics. Introducing ACT-1: A frontier robot foundation model trained on zero robot data. - Ultra long-horizon tasks - Zero-shot generalization - Advanced dexterity 🧵->

2M

Introducing ALOHA 🏖: 𝐀 𝐋ow-cost 𝐎pen-source 𝐇𝐀rdware System for Bimanual Teleoperation After 8 months iterating @stanford and 2 months working with beta users, we are finally ready to release it! Here is what ALOHA is capable of:

694k

Introducing 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 🌋 - Pushing the boundaries of dexterity with low-cost robots and AI. @GoogleDeepMind Finally got to share some videos after a few months. Robots are fully autonomous filmed in one continuous shot. Enjoy!

338k

Robots are not ready to take over the world yet! @zipengfu and I just compiled a video of the dumbest mistakes 𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀🏄 made in the autonomous mode 🤣 We are also planning to organize some live demos after taking a break. Stay tuned!

331k

Led by @GoogleDeepMind, we present ALOHA 2 🤙: An Enhanced Low-Cost Hardware for Bimanual Teleoperation. ALOHA 2 🤙 significantly improves the durability of the original ALOHA 🏖️, enabling fleet-scale data collection on more complex tasks. As usual, everything is open-sourced!

137k

Most engaged tweets of Tony Zhao

Today, we present a step-change in robotic AI @sundayrobotics. Introducing ACT-1: A frontier robot foundation model trained on zero robot data. - Ultra long-horizon tasks - Zero-shot generalization - Advanced dexterity 🧵->

2M

Introducing ALOHA 🏖: 𝐀 𝐋ow-cost 𝐎pen-source 𝐇𝐀rdware System for Bimanual Teleoperation After 8 months iterating @stanford and 2 months working with beta users, we are finally ready to release it! Here is what ALOHA is capable of:

694k

Robots are not ready to take over the world yet! @zipengfu and I just compiled a video of the dumbest mistakes 𝐌𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀🏄 made in the autonomous mode 🤣 We are also planning to organize some live demos after taking a break. Stay tuned!

331k

Introducing 𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐇𝐀 𝐔𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝 🌋 - Pushing the boundaries of dexterity with low-cost robots and AI. @GoogleDeepMind Finally got to share some videos after a few months. Robots are fully autonomous filmed in one continuous shot. Enjoy!

338k

Congrats @Figure_robot on the long-horizon dishwasher-unloading task! The WBC is really impressive. Nitpick from a roboticist: it looks like all objects this time are plastic, and some of the manipulations seem to rely on that. What changed from the previous loading demo?

365k

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