Recently Yu Sun was invited for a speech on the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in July 2024 in Shanghai China, titled “AI Can Revolutionize Service Robot”. Let’s have a deeper discussion with Yu Sun for this interesting topic.
Yu Sun is the Co-Founder & CEO of Sealand Technology, a company focused on developing and selling AI-powered service robot, serving for every aspect of the persons’ daily life to free the user from boring house keeping jobs, meanwhile improve their life quality.
Sealand offers a environmental friendly, easy-to-deploy, and AI-empowered solution that strengthen the service robot to better replace the users’ daily house keeping jobs like cleaning, sweeping, transporting, even cooking, without affecting the privacy and living habit of users. Sealand's technology is compatible with major AI models such as LLM, Transformers, ViTs, and GPT, all can be customized to user specific requirements of house structures, trash categories, and even taste of eating. By serving a wide range of clients, from Fortune 500 companies to small and medium businesses, Sealand’s service robot benefits over 500k of users worldwide.
Interviewed by our editor, Meng Han
Han: What motivated you to co-found Sealand, Inc., and how did your previous experiences shape your approach in the early stages of the company?
Sun: After my last company’s exit, I took a much-needed break to recharge and think about what I really wanted to do next. I’ve always loved building companies, so I started having conversations with an early-stage VC friend of mine. He challenged us with an intriguing question, disguised as a challenge: “How do you get value from service robot while still far from intelligent?” That challenge hooked me—solving tough problems is what I live for. There was a glaring gap between robot and intelligence. Nine years later, here we are, answering that question with Sealand’s AI-empowered service robots.
Han: With the rise of generative AI, how can companies ensure that their productscan leverage the benefits of AI technologies?
Sun: This is a question every company dabbling in AI should be asking. The key is a breakthrough innovation of generative AI can understand and customize user’s needs to provide a better service. By a simple short talk with the robot just like with Chat-GPT, our AI models first translate user’s words into input features of the generative AI models, the models then get the insights users need without searching additional information online. The generative AI model works as a human brain to quickly understand users meaning, without a time consuming and mechanical inputs from users. It’s about a human-like servant, leveraging numerical house keeping services.
Han: Can you explain the specific role of generative AI in empowering the functionalities of service robots? How does it differ from traditional service robots?
Sun: Traditional service robots focus on single task while it’s a single feedback solution. The cleaning robot only focus on floor cleaning even it’s job is not well done in most of time, leaving uncleaned trash and untouched corners of house. But with AI, we’re adding a new layer of complexity with large language model, leading to a multi-functionality of our robot, meaning that it can do the cleaning, transportation, sweeping, vacuum cleaning. By using a single service robot, you expect it to do more than 10 jobs. It significantly save your cost, and you are not needed to buy lots of machines with full fill in the house space. With AI, you can train the robot. You tell it the structure of your house, which trash to be cleaned, and how long to keep the plant on your yard. By understanding your comments, our AI-empowered robot can better serve your daily life that is customized by you only.
Han: Sealand recently launched a new service robotintegrated for GenAI. Can you share more details about how this product works and what makes it unique in the market?
Sun: Our GenAI integrated service robot is all about making house keeping simple and efficient, even when you're not at home. It plugs into an existing AI pipeline by large language model as it is being ingested. This is followed by a capability known as that understanding the user needs without searching any information, leading to a quick and efficient response of user input. Most importantly, you don’t need to change anything in your AI pipeline—no rewriting code, no hassle. Just plug it in and go. We’ve focused on ease of use and making house keeping fully automatic and customized, which is why customers are finding this solution so attractive.
Han: Youemphasizes “automatic and customized” for usingyour service robot. How does this approach benefit users, especially those with huge daily house keeping jobs?
Sun: No one wants to be messed up with large number of house keeping tools. With our “automatic” approach, users don’t need to keep an eye on our robot. This is a huge benefit for users because it means user can 100% free from boring the house keeping jobs, even without keeping an eye on our robot. It can work fully automatic to do even better job than human. While using GenAI model, out robot keeps understanding users habits, and work better to fit specific user’s life, leading to a strong customized product.
