That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.
Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.
I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.
But the problem is the majority of people buying and hyping TSLA are not working or have close experience with robotics to see what’s real vs human controlled. That’s intentionally deceptive.
I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?
In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc.
So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.
The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.
Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.
The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .
> these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones)
Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial.
Add to that gearing, couplings, driver electronics, encoders, thermal management, calibration, noise, maintenance and other per-actuator requirements and the picture quickly becomes overwhelming.
This is an area that is still looking for a significant breakthrough.
- Small, powerful 3-phase servomotors are cheap and easy to obtain. Mass production of drone motors has advanced small motor technology considerably. Tiny motors use to be either toy-grade junk or expensive Swiss precision. That's improved.
- Motors with built-in encoders are, at last, available. Encoders used to be fragile plastic boxes stuck on the end of the motor. Also, thermal sensing inside the motor is common, so you can tell if you're overheating it.
- Permanent magnets are small and powerful, and have such high coercitivity that you don't have to worry about demagnetizing them if you over-drive the motor. The main limit on motor power is cooling. You can way overdrive a motor momentarily, like muscles.
- Motor controllers are now small and cheap, They cost about $1000 per motor two decades ago. The power semiconductors are small. Controllers can be programmed to use very high power levels briefly, monitoring thermal sensors.
It would be nice to have good linear actuators. Linear motors do exist, but never really became a big thing.
I'm totally with you on the evolution of motor tech because of drone and also personal mobility (scooters and hoverboard motors are a steal for what they can handle).
While high torque motors got way cheaper, especially with MIT Cheetah "clones" getting easily available, they're still at least 200-500 a pop (depending on the torque needed for each articulation) from what I could find.
I might not know where to search for the real gems though. Where do you search for cheap powerful servomotors?
My kids have been around lots of robots of all kinds. The very first comment they made while watching the event was: "The robots are being remotely operated. There's no way that's autonomous."
Nice looking machines. Far from being practical outside of a highly controlled environment. This does feel like progress though.
If this was fake, how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated? They might as well be too to get the stock price up?
There is no way to know. I am really doubting Tesla now. It wouldn’t surprise me that, in order to prevent mishaps during the event, everything is remotely operated…
People will say: that’s not true. But where did Tesla clearly specify this upfront?
I saw the initial fullscreen disclaimer. But that might also apply to the robovans right?
> how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated?
How do you even know they were anything? It is fairly easy to mock up a concept vehicle (I mean it is still a lot of work, but nowhere near what it takes to build an actual one). You can build the shell and interior and put it on any chassis you want.
And let's be real, that robovan couldn't survive a pothole. If you watch the video of people walking out it does not look like the clearance is meaningfully different than their shoes. It is also suspicious that it doesn't seem to rise much after all the people get off. I don't have good angles from that video, so just a flag but not enough to conclude without more evidence (but this is exactly what you'd see if they built it like you do a parade float).
For the robots, I thought it was obvious they were teleoperated. Just the way they talked with people was far too natural.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla and SpaceX have done some great things. But how many times can you c̶r̶y̶ ̶w̶o̶l̶f̶ promise self-driving vehicles next year before people stop trusting you all together? I get you gotta hype (but do we? and how much?) but you gotta fulfill those promises. In 2015 he promised FSD in 2017, in 2016 he said <2018, in 2017 he said 3 but no more than 6 mo, then later that year said 2 years, and I think it's been "next year" ever year since. It's a hard problem but you can only over promise so much. And over promising like this just makes him seem like either a conman or out of touch/naive.
Honestly, it feels like faking demos is the status quo in tech right now. I can perfectly understand "illustrative" demos where you're clear that this is what you're imagining, but if you say this is how it works -- or heavily imply or demonstrate under very limited conditions while implying this is what you can expect -- it is no wonder so many people have low sentiment around tech. But do we really have to do it this way? If you need smoke and mirrors to get funding I'm not convinced that the smoke and mirrors ever stops. (and why are big players doing this? Google doesn't need funding. You're playing with fire)
Elon Musk was insulted over the internet by an emergency worker during a deadly rescue of children trapped in a flooded cave, and he responded by accusing the rescue worker of pedophelia. Elon doubled down repeatedly on the claim, such as by later clarifying that by pedophile he meant sex with young Thai boys.
He also hired an investigator to try and find any dirt on the rescue worker. Now he says this is just his way of having fun.
Anyways, you mentioned something about being disturbed. Please do continue.
I've also read the biography. It's clear that he's stable and trustworthy enough to run multiple large companies, assemble a loyal force of allies who follow him around to his different ventures, a force that includes multiple family members, and win long term government contracts.
The conclusion Isaacson himself reached is that Musk has an extraordinary need for intensity and challenge, to the extent that he becomes uncomfortable and unhappy if there isn't something big riding right on the edge of going spectacularly wrong. This is a trait that most people don't have, and it's ideal for doing the kinds of things he does. But don't mistake that need for intensity for being unstable or dishonest.
You can't be serious. Musk is under investigation for manipulating stock prices back years ago. Anything shown on these events must be assumed fake until proven otherwise.
No need for doubt. There's no reason to remotely operate the van since it's a vehicle like the car, and it is already known that they have mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years.
It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
How is stuff like this not considered fraud? This seems much worse to me than Musk's usual Tesla lies in which he is predicting some future capability. At least there is an argument that Musk believed it those at the time he said them or that they were optimistically possible despite being impractical. This seems to be material misrepresentation of the viability of one of the company's core R&D projects that Musk claims "will be the biggest product ever".
Were you at the event or do you have a source for that claim? I have seen video of one of the bots refusing to give an answer to that question and there were multiple articles in the wake of the event that couldn't come to any definitive conclusion so I'm skeptical of this claim of immediate transparency.
Is this the video you saw (posting below, for you and anyone who hasn't seen it).
While ignoring the question the first time, he did confirm that they were being assisted by a human. Perhaps not as clear as 'remotely operated', but that's about how I took the answer. YMMV.
No, the one I saw ducked the question multiple times so that video is more informative even if "assisted by a human" is still somewhat vague. I guess they just left what to disclose up to the individual operator making the level of deception dependent on who you happened to ask. Such a bizarre way to handle an event like this, but I guess that type of haphazard approach should be unsurprising for a Musk run company at this point.
Tesla (Elon Musk) is under investigation for fraud for insinuating robotaxies are just around the corner, and you should buy the already available hardware for 100k that'll yield you 30k/year in the near future.
When it became public knowledge, more value was written off Tesla stock than Enron, Theranos and Nikola combined.
Did you know that many demos on events like Google IO are scripted or hardcoded? I'm saying that not to advocate for such practices, but rather to provide context.
For what it's worth, it was quite clear to many that the robots are teleoperated and it still serves as a demonstration of the hardware.
Fraud is a material misstatement of fact to induce someone to do something. It's really not clear that there's any actual inducement here; this isn't exactly the centerpoint of a pitch video to investors. (As it turns out, Tesla's stock went down like 9% the next day after the event, with most of the analysts' reactions to the announcement essentially being "okay, so he doesn't really have anything that he wasn't already pitching").
Didn't OpenAI demo facetime with a H.E.R. like chatbot/AI friend in April?
Where is that.. it's not available to anyone I know and was that actual real tech running or just faked demos? The tech playbook is hype even if it's not real and or really exists ... hype it up .. make them pay for the promise of something they think exists but it doesnt. Similar thing here Musk following the technology/startup playbook ... hype hype hype make people think it's real .. boost stocks as Open AI boosted it's subscription revenue Im sure in April of a promise of something that may or may not exist.
I subscribed twice and felt screwed not going to subscribe again until i see a live in person demo and or a trusted tech news source saying its available to all with a video showing them using it. Is there a recent such tech news report saying and showing such? Be good to see it!
I did startups and played this hype and create fake content/news to boost metrics and saw results. And yet i signed up twice lol
Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.
Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.
Hopefully, they will check for overemployment before allowing them to remotely control, otherwise we end up with one operator controlling several cars. I don’t know if it is good or bad
I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?
If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...
I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.
...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.
I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.
It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.
> Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
Your risk analysis on this is completely wrong. If there is some vetting here this is fine. No different than a babysitter or a handyman off the Internet
You're saying then that tools exist to scan and ping all babysiters and handymen across the globe, fingerprint them for version, lookup zero-days, apply them to matching staff, exploit that to monitor children remotely, and take control over home assistants function to shepard children out the door to a "party van" ?
That's the ecosystem that surrounds most actual IoT devices - I can't see home robots being any different.
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.
It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
Errr, I am saying that Elon's claims are obviously BS until we start to see Tesla doing something like what Waymo has had for years(1): a team of people ready to intervene and fix things that are outside the training set of the ML.
I happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.
1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.
Elon Musk has displayed incredible prowess at manipulating modern internet media. He launched "tesla shorts" right when a few big short sellers announced their positions (I believe one of them also put out a report about TSLA being insolvent aside from income from pre-orders, and was proven correct by Musk years later) and SEO-ed them into the ground.
I would assume that several of the pro-elon accounts on most social media are actually either bots or shills. You don't need many shills to get real people interested.
What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures. The only danger would be if one fell over.
1x NEO looks awesome and far more advanced than this version of Optimus. I'm bullish on 1x. Tesla has a manufacturing advantage though. There were 50 units of Optimus at the event and I expect that there are only a few fully working units of NEO made so far. Also, Optimus has been improving quickly. It's possible Tesla could catch up in a few generations.
>Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures.
More importantly, the robots were limited to doing no real work. They just feebly pick up objects and place them somewhere else, which I am pretty sure doesn't require AI.
For example, the vid shows the robot pouring hot water into a glass with a massive funnel strapped to it. Why not have the robot fill the kettle, place the teabag itself, etc? It seems like the kind of thing that should be developed before walking and talking and telling jokes.
What if the refrigerator, microwave, etc. could interface directly with the robot. For example, the refrigerator has some type of robotized shelf that is able to bring a rack of orange juice to the front before the robot comes over to grab it? What if the microwave is able to focus the microwave beam on the food to cook it evenly?
It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes. Does it need to wear a helmet? Does it need exactly 2 eyes at exactly human-like placement to achieve stereopsis? Why not have 3 eyes? Did the designers think about the form of the machine at all, or did they just produce robots in the form that is associated with the most hype and thus will bring in the most investor capital? Is this really the ideal form for interfacing with humans? With other robots?
I am just very skeptical of these companies that want to go from zero to doing everything. By the time they accomplish a robot that can do "everything", who is to say that they will even be able to privatize it? The "everything robot" might just be built out of general-purpose components and software at that point. Why not just make a machine that does a limited set of tasks well and then build from there?
>It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes.
the risk-averse, cowardly, snivelling product design is really one of the most odious things about the whole Tesla shitshow. they had the opportunity to completely redesign the automobile from scratch, but chose to meekly clone the exact same bog standard sedan design everyone else converged on 50 years ago, clinging to some form response about safety despite the front of a Tesla crumpling like paper in any collision anyway
Though they can't move away too much from the teardrop design, it's one of the most aerodynamic shapes (and why so many production cars look like a decorated teardrop). Still agree they could have been bolder with other parts of the silhouette, it's unimaginative "futurism" coupled with some strange need to be branded Apple-esque.
Elastic tendons seem like a pretty reasonable solution to this problem, but can it be applied to all the joints (like ball-socket, etc.) I wonder?
I think the chassis of the robot should also have compliance, humans certainly do have squishy spines. I mean imagine you're on the street and you have to share sidewalk space with these things. Running into it would hurt.
We had people swearing up and down that the Cybertruck would never be released because it was stock fraud. They already seem to be at a run rate of $1.5 billion in revenue per quarter despite launching in a limited fashion because of manufacturing ramp up.
I haven't really been tracking this, but aren't they selling at a price much greater than they originially announced? I would classify it as "mixed success"
The base model isn't entering production until next year but is quoted by Car and Driver as starting at $62,985. The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then, and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price. But I think the extra 4 years of delay (for the base model vs the announced availability date of 2021) is the bigger issue.
But ultimately all that matters from Tesla's perspective is that they are selling. My understanding is that even the current top end expensive models are selling about as many units as all other electric trucks combined.
> The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then
That price was announced with a significant lead time, so at least 5-6% inflation was built in already.
> and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
It wasn't available that exact moment, but it existed.
> All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price.
I'd put the inflation-adjusted price at $46k, and not use the $7500 to reduce the difference, making $63k a 36% increase. Or I'd apply the $7500 to both and get 44%.
The $7500 existed only for other manufacturers. It had expired entirely for Tesla. No Tesla model was eligible for any more credits at that time and there was no particular reason to believe that Tesla would ever become eligible again in the future. Also, the credit back then did not directly reduce the price paid at purchase time the way it does today. I think it is fair to apply the credit when comparing to the announced price. Tesla certainly takes the credit into account when they set pricing and buyers account for it when purchasing.
Also it was announced at the end of 2019 for 2021 and the inflation rate in 2019 was 1.8% so there's no way they accounted for 6% inflation. 4% at most.
Whether it'd be a true success remains to be seen, at least in terms of making a profit on total investment. My point was that it certainly wasn't vaporware, even if it didn't sell well.
Tesla was not trying to hide this. The robots were telling anyone who asked that humans were helping control them. Unlike the robotaxis, which were explicitly advertised as autonomous.
They’re prototype mechanisms that don’t have any sort of significant AI yet. Them having AI was never claimed. They’re shells, with (as shown) extremely fluid control systems, with the smarts to drive them still in development, all of it for a whopping three years now.
I don’t know. Despite being remotely controlled, their movements were smooth and human like. I mean it’s literal untethered bipedal robots walking around in the midst of a party. It’s already pretty incredible in my opinion and can only go up from here.
Am I missing something or was the point for those robots to be human controlled?
Tesla is trying to have disposable body parts that are remotely controlled so their workers get hurt less often due to RSI or other assembly line accidents. It’s not like they’ll fix their safety culture if the occasional robot destruction keeps volume up and injuries down.
It seemed to me the goal of the event was to make people imagine a dazzling sci-fi future from a schoolboy’s imagination, and not notice that the demo didn’t show much proof of technical advancement in automated driving.
I was assuming that the robots at the Sphere also had some humans behind it if nothing more than to help "guide" the AI pieces. My assumption, at least.
Or Teslas "battery swap" event which actually helped them earn them a huge amount of subsidies from the government. Watching after understanding Elons m.o. it is clearly fake or how else would they have a planned demo on stage with cameras that aren't positioned to show anything that's going on and then that tech they developed was never heard from again. They just distracted the crowd with a video of someone filling up at a gas station
To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology.
To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups.
There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.
Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.
Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.
I'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
Battery density is only an issue if these things are spending most of their time moving long distances. If you are targeting a drop in replacement for a human worker who is spending most of their time at a workstation, it can be plugged in while working. Even in a scenario where the robot can not be connected to power while working, that's easily solved with redundancy - get two robots, one works while the other charges. Obviously better battery life is a nice to have, but it's not an impediment to large scale adoption the way other big robotics problems are.
Tangential question: are there any actuators out there that mimic the animal muscle tissue, i.e. swelling laterally in order to shorten a tendon and pull a joint? This seems like a very elegant method compared to servos with all sorts of slack and rigid positioning. I'm not a roboticist so I'm not familiar with state of the art in actuators.
That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection drops and the like. You would need a specialized mower with collision detection/etc. to handle this, and at this point you might as well discard the robot and just have a remotely operated mower instead.
However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.
Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment.
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
Don't get me wrong I think this guy's idea is incredibly stupid. But, have you ever operated a mower? They're not fast. A few hundred ms of latency on a mower is no problem at all.
What stood out to me is that the speed of the movements makes it clear the autonomous balance control just isn't there. You can simulate this: try to move your upper body while standing up without changing the balance or stance of your legs and hips - unless you move slowly you can't do it, whereas if you put any force or momentum behind it you'll feel yourself straining pretty hard to stay upright.
When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).
Come on, isn't this obvious? There's no way in crap they were fully autonomous, and I don't think anyone ever claimed that they were. In fact there's multiple examples of them saying "I am remote operated" when asked.
And that doesn't in any way take away from the fact that it's damn cool that they went from "guy in spandex suit" to a walking, dextrous, low latency telepresence robot in a few years.
I hate Musk's new politics (which is obviously what this is all about) but I feel bad for the engineers involved: I suspect everyone was stoked to show off their impressive progress, and a few marketing people decided to under-emphasize the telepresence and made them all look like jerks.
I might be an idiot but it wasn't obvious to me. Watching the demo of the robot standing stationary, responding to a customer ask for (and point to) cellophane bags of chocolate and then the robot grab and pass it to the customer seemed like a reasonable tech demo to show at an event like this and it impressed me.
Yeah but they had the robots hi-fiving, pouring drinks on demand, chatting, playing rock paper scissors... fair enough you could get that idea if you only watched a very small amount of video, but that doesn't equate to Elon Musk hiding things from you.
I'd like to just say that Gwynne Shotwell might be one of the best executives in the world.
Shotwell has SpaceX catching rockets with chopsticks, while being able to keep Elon from f*cking it all up by "sleeping on the factory floor" or whatever other stunt he is pulling.
Tesla looks like a complete stock fraud sham for at least 5+ years (remember buying SolarCity because cousins?), then Boring and, Le Sigh.
Dude literally did a "We, Robot" event and then copied the "I, Robot" movie designs. He isn't even trying anymore, this is just his "rocket fuel" scam for whatever other shiny object he desires.
I'm super frustrated that someone set "good" things in motion, and we are letting them Mullenweg it all up.
man these demos are synonimous to slides and mockups by startup founders. they are intended to paint the probable future, the ideal end game user experience.
lots of people confuse it as the shippable product already. no sir, it's not like that.
It's perplexing because Elon is effective at fundraising and pursuing challenging and ambitious goals.
However now Tesla cars are protected by a 100% tariff on competitors, and Elon is campaigning for Trump who is now promising 200% tariffs on imported goods.
The gigapress sounded like a good idea when I first heard about it bc it could reduce manufacturing costs, yet Tesla does not seem to have realized any significant improvements in 2024 from it, and needs massive protectionist policies to compete.
It's interesting to imagine the price and performance we'd be seeing (and all the new dealerships and service centers popping up) of Chinese engineered and manufactured EVs if it weren't for the tariffs. Surely there would be some very capable options in the $20K range that would eat the Model 3's lunch. But Elon has government protection to the rescue and so he doesn't have to actually win at engineering or manufacturing, only lobbying.
You’re simplifying things a bit here. The tariffs are to protect all US car manufacturers (who all have EV directives) from BYD, who was strategically subsidized by the government to crush EV companies, including Tesla [1]. Tesla would be able to compete much easier if we were to throw out the environmental regulations and better utilize slave labor [2].
That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
Demos from just-about every single humanoid robot company are highly scripted and teleoperated (telechirs). Nothing new here.
Generally speaking, the only demos that are not of the scripted and human-in-the-loop kind are simple ones. Even food delivery robots have remote drivers. Warehouse and floor cleaning robots are probably the two main examples of reasonably autonomous operation in a relatively constrained environment. Welding and assembly robots just play back a script, not unlike a CNC machine.
Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
There's a company in vegas that pilots a rental car to you so you can be picked up anywhere and when you hop out, it drives off. You rent by the hour or something like that
Waymo vehicles are not driven remotely. Remote assistants give the autonomy stack suggestions for how to proceed rather than drive the vehicle. This doesn't require a low latency connection and the robot is still capable of stopping when the situation changes or proceeding as soon as it's able to without a control handover.
Yes, they are not usually driven remotely, but an operator can take the wheel in an emergency situation. Most of the interventions are "this plan or that one?" decisions from the teleoperators.
That still isn't really "autonomous," but it's a lot closer than anything Tesla has done. My question, though, is how frequent the interventions actually are.
Hey Chris, thanks for your continued diligence. This is actually a recent and related discussion, as the duplicate status suggests the same article has been posted twice (e.g. slightly altering a URL parameter to escape the HN dupe-detector).
P.s. If you found the content in one article to be better than another, it would be helpful to steer folks towards the more informative one. In this case, the above Bloomberg article is pretty substantial compared to the one you've linked as a "dupe". Take care.
Dupe means duplicate discussion. There is an earlier discussion on this news story with plenty of upvotes and comments. Stop splitting up the threads, especially when it's a news story already developed from multiple days ago. Got something to add? Share it over there. Even maybe suggest the link over there in some cases even as a replacement article option. Stop splitting up threads and forcing us to repeat ourselves over and over. The discussion is over there.
I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"
AI is a pretty broad term - its been used for generations to mean something intelligent seeming that isn't human. Certainly, computers running precompiled instructions also falls in that category.
Those are definitely exaggerations for marketing purposes.
I find it incredibly silly that 20+ years after the first more advanced "AIs" in games like Half Life, we're still far from a point where I can fire up a game of Dota 2 with bots and have the bots behave constantly well at an intermediate level, so that I can turn Dota 2 into a solid single player experience (I don't have the time nor the patience, anymore, for managing a team of toddler brains for 30-60 minutes).
That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.
Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.
I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.
But the problem is the majority of people buying and hyping TSLA are not working or have close experience with robotics to see what’s real vs human controlled. That’s intentionally deceptive.
I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?
In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc. So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.
The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.
Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.
The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .
> these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones)
Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial.
Add to that gearing, couplings, driver electronics, encoders, thermal management, calibration, noise, maintenance and other per-actuator requirements and the picture quickly becomes overwhelming.
This is an area that is still looking for a significant breakthrough.
The big breakthroughs have already happened.
- Small, powerful 3-phase servomotors are cheap and easy to obtain. Mass production of drone motors has advanced small motor technology considerably. Tiny motors use to be either toy-grade junk or expensive Swiss precision. That's improved.
- Motors with built-in encoders are, at last, available. Encoders used to be fragile plastic boxes stuck on the end of the motor. Also, thermal sensing inside the motor is common, so you can tell if you're overheating it.
- Permanent magnets are small and powerful, and have such high coercitivity that you don't have to worry about demagnetizing them if you over-drive the motor. The main limit on motor power is cooling. You can way overdrive a motor momentarily, like muscles.
- Motor controllers are now small and cheap, They cost about $1000 per motor two decades ago. The power semiconductors are small. Controllers can be programmed to use very high power levels briefly, monitoring thermal sensors.
It would be nice to have good linear actuators. Linear motors do exist, but never really became a big thing.
I'm totally with you on the evolution of motor tech because of drone and also personal mobility (scooters and hoverboard motors are a steal for what they can handle).
While high torque motors got way cheaper, especially with MIT Cheetah "clones" getting easily available, they're still at least 200-500 a pop (depending on the torque needed for each articulation) from what I could find.
I might not know where to search for the real gems though. Where do you search for cheap powerful servomotors?
We need better electroactive polymers.
They moved so smoothly, I was impressed
Ever the speech was just a guy trying to pretend he was a robot.
> That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.
Yup. Exactly. The term for this is "Telechir":
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-93104-8_...
My kids have been around lots of robots of all kinds. The very first comment they made while watching the event was: "The robots are being remotely operated. There's no way that's autonomous."
Nice looking machines. Far from being practical outside of a highly controlled environment. This does feel like progress though.
I heard the initial walk out was fully automated.
Where did you hear that?
[dead]
This results in me trusting Tesla less.
If this was fake, how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated? They might as well be too to get the stock price up?
There is no way to know. I am really doubting Tesla now. It wouldn’t surprise me that, in order to prevent mishaps during the event, everything is remotely operated…
People will say: that’s not true. But where did Tesla clearly specify this upfront?
I saw the initial fullscreen disclaimer. But that might also apply to the robovans right?
And let's be real, that robovan couldn't survive a pothole. If you watch the video of people walking out it does not look like the clearance is meaningfully different than their shoes. It is also suspicious that it doesn't seem to rise much after all the people get off. I don't have good angles from that video, so just a flag but not enough to conclude without more evidence (but this is exactly what you'd see if they built it like you do a parade float).
For the robots, I thought it was obvious they were teleoperated. Just the way they talked with people was far too natural.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla and SpaceX have done some great things. But how many times can you c̶r̶y̶ ̶w̶o̶l̶f̶ promise self-driving vehicles next year before people stop trusting you all together? I get you gotta hype (but do we? and how much?) but you gotta fulfill those promises. In 2015 he promised FSD in 2017, in 2016 he said <2018, in 2017 he said 3 but no more than 6 mo, then later that year said 2 years, and I think it's been "next year" ever year since. It's a hard problem but you can only over promise so much. And over promising like this just makes him seem like either a conman or out of touch/naive.
Honestly, it feels like faking demos is the status quo in tech right now. I can perfectly understand "illustrative" demos where you're clear that this is what you're imagining, but if you say this is how it works -- or heavily imply or demonstrate under very limited conditions while implying this is what you can expect -- it is no wonder so many people have low sentiment around tech. But do we really have to do it this way? If you need smoke and mirrors to get funding I'm not convinced that the smoke and mirrors ever stops. (and why are big players doing this? Google doesn't need funding. You're playing with fire)
Look at the first reveal of Cybertruck versus what shipped. Those vans are going to look like crap.
After reading the Isaacson biography, it’s clear to me Elon is not a stable or trustworthy person. The evidence continues to mount.
after reading the actual words he writes himself and publishes them for the world to see I came to the same conclusion
When people tell you who they are, listen.
I find this thread disturbing, and with 0 examples as to why you guys think that about him. Like what are these things he's written and said.
Do you think you look convincing, trying to pretend you're not aware of Elon Musk's reputation?
He's literally the richest person on Earth. It's as if you're pretending you don't know what Santa Claus is about.
I've heard of Santa Claus, but what does he do exactly?
Elon Musk was insulted over the internet by an emergency worker during a deadly rescue of children trapped in a flooded cave, and he responded by accusing the rescue worker of pedophelia. Elon doubled down repeatedly on the claim, such as by later clarifying that by pedophile he meant sex with young Thai boys.
He also hired an investigator to try and find any dirt on the rescue worker. Now he says this is just his way of having fun.
Anyways, you mentioned something about being disturbed. Please do continue.
I've also read the biography. It's clear that he's stable and trustworthy enough to run multiple large companies, assemble a loyal force of allies who follow him around to his different ventures, a force that includes multiple family members, and win long term government contracts.
The conclusion Isaacson himself reached is that Musk has an extraordinary need for intensity and challenge, to the extent that he becomes uncomfortable and unhappy if there isn't something big riding right on the edge of going spectacularly wrong. This is a trait that most people don't have, and it's ideal for doing the kinds of things he does. But don't mistake that need for intensity for being unstable or dishonest.
Interesting. How did you come to this conclusion? Any specific thing or rather the overall impression after reading the book?
They still haven’t shipped the new roadster despite taking a pretty huge investment from customers for it.
You can't be serious. Musk is under investigation for manipulating stock prices back years ago. Anything shown on these events must be assumed fake until proven otherwise.
Ever heard of "fake it till you make it"?
No need for doubt. There's no reason to remotely operate the van since it's a vehicle like the car, and it is already known that they have mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years.
>mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years
Given the staggering amount of mishaps that have been showcased, I would dispute this
It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
It's all about creating a high stock price, then take out a loan on the stock, and have a nice life.
Musk needs a high stock price and a loan?
yes. to cover the other loans he has.
> And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
And Boring Company salesmen...
How is stuff like this not considered fraud? This seems much worse to me than Musk's usual Tesla lies in which he is predicting some future capability. At least there is an argument that Musk believed it those at the time he said them or that they were optimistically possible despite being impractical. This seems to be material misrepresentation of the viability of one of the company's core R&D projects that Musk claims "will be the biggest product ever".
Quite a few people at the event asked employees about this and were directly given the answer. It wasn't a secret.
Were you at the event or do you have a source for that claim? I have seen video of one of the bots refusing to give an answer to that question and there were multiple articles in the wake of the event that couldn't come to any definitive conclusion so I'm skeptical of this claim of immediate transparency.
Is this the video you saw (posting below, for you and anyone who hasn't seen it).
While ignoring the question the first time, he did confirm that they were being assisted by a human. Perhaps not as clear as 'remotely operated', but that's about how I took the answer. YMMV.
https://x.com/zhen9436/status/1844773471240294651
No, the one I saw ducked the question multiple times so that video is more informative even if "assisted by a human" is still somewhat vague. I guess they just left what to disclose up to the individual operator making the level of deception dependent on who you happened to ask. Such a bizarre way to handle an event like this, but I guess that type of haphazard approach should be unsurprising for a Musk run company at this point.
The fact that the fraud was lazy and blatant makes it worse, not better.
Less lazy than a dancer in a skin tight robot suit. Progress!
Nikola (Trevor Milton) was busted for fraud for insinuating that trucks rolling down slopes were working models.
> insinuating
Didn't he say "this is not a pusher?"
Tesla (Elon Musk) is under investigation for fraud for insinuating robotaxies are just around the corner, and you should buy the already available hardware for 100k that'll yield you 30k/year in the near future. When it became public knowledge, more value was written off Tesla stock than Enron, Theranos and Nikola combined.
Did you know that many demos on events like Google IO are scripted or hardcoded? I'm saying that not to advocate for such practices, but rather to provide context.
For what it's worth, it was quite clear to many that the robots are teleoperated and it still serves as a demonstration of the hardware.
Fraud is a material misstatement of fact to induce someone to do something. It's really not clear that there's any actual inducement here; this isn't exactly the centerpoint of a pitch video to investors. (As it turns out, Tesla's stock went down like 9% the next day after the event, with most of the analysts' reactions to the announcement essentially being "okay, so he doesn't really have anything that he wasn't already pitching").
Didn't OpenAI demo facetime with a H.E.R. like chatbot/AI friend in April?
Where is that.. it's not available to anyone I know and was that actual real tech running or just faked demos? The tech playbook is hype even if it's not real and or really exists ... hype it up .. make them pay for the promise of something they think exists but it doesnt. Similar thing here Musk following the technology/startup playbook ... hype hype hype make people think it's real .. boost stocks as Open AI boosted it's subscription revenue Im sure in April of a promise of something that may or may not exist.
The safety people got a hold of it, but they did end up releasing it, although it refuses to do a lot of simple stuff you ask it to.
“The safety people” are gone.
OpenAI is just very comfortable lying right around the time google is doing a big public announcement.
Where is Sora? Everyone and their dog has video gen out now, Sora is conspicuously absent.
I subscribed twice and felt screwed not going to subscribe again until i see a live in person demo and or a trusted tech news source saying its available to all with a video showing them using it. Is there a recent such tech news report saying and showing such? Be good to see it!
I did startups and played this hype and create fake content/news to boost metrics and saw results. And yet i signed up twice lol
That OpenAI demo is available right now to subscribers; I have access to it
Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.
Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.
Also reminds me of amazons cashierless grocery stores
I mean, that's a classic for literally centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
Hopefully, they will check for overemployment before allowing them to remotely control, otherwise we end up with one operator controlling several cars. I don’t know if it is good or bad
It's AI - Actually an Indian
As I I see the delivery robot do it’s job... a game being played by remote workers doing the Enders game.
The terrifying secret of all those European truck simulator games.
Now I am going to be forever haunted by all those trucks I destroyed
You may already know this but Heinlein wrote about waldos pretty early, incorporating it into several stories and books.
I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?
If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...
I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.
...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.
I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.
> Is it that bad of an idea?
Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.
Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.
Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.
There are FPV drones, although I am not sure about their precision
> Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
Your risk analysis on this is completely wrong. If there is some vetting here this is fine. No different than a babysitter or a handyman off the Internet
My “vetted” Doordash/Ubereats drivers sometimes end up eating part of my meals.
You're saying then that tools exist to scan and ping all babysiters and handymen across the globe, fingerprint them for version, lookup zero-days, apply them to matching staff, exploit that to monitor children remotely, and take control over home assistants function to shepard children out the door to a "party van" ?
That's the ecosystem that surrounds most actual IoT devices - I can't see home robots being any different.
The Pied Piper, in robot form.
Who gets a babysitter off the Internet?
Apparently at least everyone who keeps this website going, at least: https://www.babysits.org/
>but is it that bad of an idea?
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
The problem is it was presented in the most manipulative and deceptive way possible.
I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.
It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
Incredible
Errr, I am saying that Elon's claims are obviously BS until we start to see Tesla doing something like what Waymo has had for years(1): a team of people ready to intervene and fix things that are outside the training set of the ML.
I happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.
1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.
Elon Musk has displayed incredible prowess at manipulating modern internet media. He launched "tesla shorts" right when a few big short sellers announced their positions (I believe one of them also put out a report about TSLA being insolvent aside from income from pre-orders, and was proven correct by Musk years later) and SEO-ed them into the ground.
I would assume that several of the pro-elon accounts on most social media are actually either bots or shills. You don't need many shills to get real people interested.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to said anything about Elon Musk in this case
Not directly, but he and Tesla are unfortunately inextricably linked.
or you even have a single driver in charge of 20 vehicles, waiting for one of them to encounter a situation the system can't handle automatically
What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE (also remote controlled for now, while being trained)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb6LMPXRdVc
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_robotics
Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures. The only danger would be if one fell over.
1x NEO looks awesome and far more advanced than this version of Optimus. I'm bullish on 1x. Tesla has a manufacturing advantage though. There were 50 units of Optimus at the event and I expect that there are only a few fully working units of NEO made so far. Also, Optimus has been improving quickly. It's possible Tesla could catch up in a few generations.
>Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures.
More importantly, the robots were limited to doing no real work. They just feebly pick up objects and place them somewhere else, which I am pretty sure doesn't require AI.
For example, the vid shows the robot pouring hot water into a glass with a massive funnel strapped to it. Why not have the robot fill the kettle, place the teabag itself, etc? It seems like the kind of thing that should be developed before walking and talking and telling jokes.
What if the refrigerator, microwave, etc. could interface directly with the robot. For example, the refrigerator has some type of robotized shelf that is able to bring a rack of orange juice to the front before the robot comes over to grab it? What if the microwave is able to focus the microwave beam on the food to cook it evenly?
It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes. Does it need to wear a helmet? Does it need exactly 2 eyes at exactly human-like placement to achieve stereopsis? Why not have 3 eyes? Did the designers think about the form of the machine at all, or did they just produce robots in the form that is associated with the most hype and thus will bring in the most investor capital? Is this really the ideal form for interfacing with humans? With other robots?
I am just very skeptical of these companies that want to go from zero to doing everything. By the time they accomplish a robot that can do "everything", who is to say that they will even be able to privatize it? The "everything robot" might just be built out of general-purpose components and software at that point. Why not just make a machine that does a limited set of tasks well and then build from there?
Sorry https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ has me coping and seething at the AI space
>It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes.
the risk-averse, cowardly, snivelling product design is really one of the most odious things about the whole Tesla shitshow. they had the opportunity to completely redesign the automobile from scratch, but chose to meekly clone the exact same bog standard sedan design everyone else converged on 50 years ago, clinging to some form response about safety despite the front of a Tesla crumpling like paper in any collision anyway
Though they can't move away too much from the teardrop design, it's one of the most aerodynamic shapes (and why so many production cars look like a decorated teardrop). Still agree they could have been bolder with other parts of the silhouette, it's unimaginative "futurism" coupled with some strange need to be branded Apple-esque.
As a fan of humanoid robots, humanoid robots only serve the human desire to experience another being in their likeness.
Boston dynamics went back to building arms on wheels.
Right now, 1X and Tesla use entirely different mechanical architectures, don't they? Do you think that Tesla will end up with compliant robots?
Tesla is getting closer with tendon-based hands in the next generation of Optimus. Who knows where they will end up.
Elastic tendons seem like a pretty reasonable solution to this problem, but can it be applied to all the joints (like ball-socket, etc.) I wonder?
I think the chassis of the robot should also have compliance, humans certainly do have squishy spines. I mean imagine you're on the street and you have to share sidewalk space with these things. Running into it would hurt.
The tendons are as inelastic as possible. The compliance comes from direct drive motors with no gearing (or as minimal as possible).
A few generations of what, pretending their robots work?
Honestly, I don't know why I bother continuing to engage here. HN community, is this the quality of discourse you want to encourage?
The discussion you’re looking for is happening over on X. It’s long been dead here.
We had people swearing up and down that the Cybertruck would never be released because it was stock fraud. They already seem to be at a run rate of $1.5 billion in revenue per quarter despite launching in a limited fashion because of manufacturing ramp up.
I haven't really been tracking this, but aren't they selling at a price much greater than they originially announced? I would classify it as "mixed success"
The base model isn't entering production until next year but is quoted by Car and Driver as starting at $62,985. The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then, and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price. But I think the extra 4 years of delay (for the base model vs the announced availability date of 2021) is the bigger issue.
But ultimately all that matters from Tesla's perspective is that they are selling. My understanding is that even the current top end expensive models are selling about as many units as all other electric trucks combined.
> The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then
That price was announced with a significant lead time, so at least 5-6% inflation was built in already.
> and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
It wasn't available that exact moment, but it existed.
> All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price.
I'd put the inflation-adjusted price at $46k, and not use the $7500 to reduce the difference, making $63k a 36% increase. Or I'd apply the $7500 to both and get 44%.
The $7500 existed only for other manufacturers. It had expired entirely for Tesla. No Tesla model was eligible for any more credits at that time and there was no particular reason to believe that Tesla would ever become eligible again in the future. Also, the credit back then did not directly reduce the price paid at purchase time the way it does today. I think it is fair to apply the credit when comparing to the announced price. Tesla certainly takes the credit into account when they set pricing and buyers account for it when purchasing.
Also it was announced at the end of 2019 for 2021 and the inflation rate in 2019 was 1.8% so there's no way they accounted for 6% inflation. 4% at most.
The rebate had existed before, and the quota renewing at some point between announcement and release was not a crazy idea.
If Tesla's jacking up the price because of that rebate, they get NO credit for it. 63k is what they are charging and what I will judge them on.
And I don't think the exact moment it applies really matters.
Whether it'd be a true success remains to be seen, at least in terms of making a profit on total investment. My point was that it certainly wasn't vaporware, even if it didn't sell well.
[flagged]
Tesla was not trying to hide this. The robots were telling anyone who asked that humans were helping control them. Unlike the robotaxis, which were explicitly advertised as autonomous.
They didn’t say the extent of the control and the event was engineered to lead people to conclude human involvement was minor.
Saying otherwise when directly asked would have been an open-and-shut case of securities fraud. They still didn't widely disclose this.
Awesome, now show me where is the article coverage (which is generally paid PR) that states this upfront and clearly.
So these robots are not supposed to be autonomous?
They’re prototype mechanisms that don’t have any sort of significant AI yet. Them having AI was never claimed. They’re shells, with (as shown) extremely fluid control systems, with the smarts to drive them still in development, all of it for a whopping three years now.
If I worked on Optimus I would be so angry about the decision to so this. Now nobody will trust the brand or the product. Stupid.
Are Elon companies known for being trustworthy in marketing?
If they ever were that should have ended when FSD was first 'delivered'. With a possible carve out for SpaceX?
I don’t know. Despite being remotely controlled, their movements were smooth and human like. I mean it’s literal untethered bipedal robots walking around in the midst of a party. It’s already pretty incredible in my opinion and can only go up from here.
Agreed. By next year they’ll be able to outsource the puppetry to a nearby developing country.
Discussions
(112 points, 1 day ago, 108 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831009
(89 points, 2 days ago, 92 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
https://archive.is/mds9I
Artificial artificial intelligence.
Am I missing something or was the point for those robots to be human controlled?
Tesla is trying to have disposable body parts that are remotely controlled so their workers get hurt less often due to RSI or other assembly line accidents. It’s not like they’ll fix their safety culture if the occasional robot destruction keeps volume up and injuries down.
Reference? Them being eventually autonomous has been covered in the events and his talks about the eventual AI that will drive them.
No reference, this is my personal hypothesis. Tesla still needs to squeeze profit out of all this R&D.
Eventually AI eventually could take over, sure. What I see today is they can have humans control the robots for tasks that can easily injure humans.
It seemed to me the goal of the event was to make people imagine a dazzling sci-fi future from a schoolboy’s imagination, and not notice that the demo didn’t show much proof of technical advancement in automated driving.
Parking the obvious sentiment here which I agree with. Is there a market for human controlled robots like this ?
I was assuming that the robots at the Sphere also had some humans behind it if nothing more than to help "guide" the AI pieces. My assumption, at least.
Reminiscent of Nikola's semi truck demonstration...
Or Teslas "battery swap" event which actually helped them earn them a huge amount of subsidies from the government. Watching after understanding Elons m.o. it is clearly fake or how else would they have a planned demo on stage with cameras that aren't positioned to show anything that's going on and then that tech they developed was never heard from again. They just distracted the crowd with a video of someone filling up at a gas station
they did have a swapping station in CA they built to get the subsidy. it wasnt fake, just pointless
There was no announcement that the robots were autonomous. So it follows that they were not.
There wasn't really misrepresentation here, at least as far as the ro ots are concerned.
To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology.
To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups.
There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.
Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.
Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.
I'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
Battery density is only an issue if these things are spending most of their time moving long distances. If you are targeting a drop in replacement for a human worker who is spending most of their time at a workstation, it can be plugged in while working. Even in a scenario where the robot can not be connected to power while working, that's easily solved with redundancy - get two robots, one works while the other charges. Obviously better battery life is a nice to have, but it's not an impediment to large scale adoption the way other big robotics problems are.
> easily solved with redundancy - get two robots.
Yay, twice as expensive.
And power tethers on robots suck so hard. Try it sometime, you’ll hate it.
Tangential question: are there any actuators out there that mimic the animal muscle tissue, i.e. swelling laterally in order to shorten a tendon and pull a joint? This seems like a very elegant method compared to servos with all sorts of slack and rigid positioning. I'm not a roboticist so I'm not familiar with state of the art in actuators.
They exist, but they're inefficient compared to ordinary motors.
That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
> Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs
IIRC, that wasn't a control problem but a mechanical failure of a gearmotor shaft.
I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection drops and the like. You would need a specialized mower with collision detection/etc. to handle this, and at this point you might as well discard the robot and just have a remotely operated mower instead.
However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.
Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment.
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
Don't get me wrong I think this guy's idea is incredibly stupid. But, have you ever operated a mower? They're not fast. A few hundred ms of latency on a mower is no problem at all.
What stood out to me is that the speed of the movements makes it clear the autonomous balance control just isn't there. You can simulate this: try to move your upper body while standing up without changing the balance or stance of your legs and hips - unless you move slowly you can't do it, whereas if you put any force or momentum behind it you'll feel yourself straining pretty hard to stay upright.
When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).
> To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation.
I agree but it is frustrating watching Elon like Michael Copperfield but thinking it is real like a 4 year old.
I don't see a clear advantage of Tesla against other competitors if he will launch it in a couple of years.
David Copperfield is the magician’s name, if that’s who you meant
Come on, isn't this obvious? There's no way in crap they were fully autonomous, and I don't think anyone ever claimed that they were. In fact there's multiple examples of them saying "I am remote operated" when asked.
And that doesn't in any way take away from the fact that it's damn cool that they went from "guy in spandex suit" to a walking, dextrous, low latency telepresence robot in a few years.
I hate Musk's new politics (which is obviously what this is all about) but I feel bad for the engineers involved: I suspect everyone was stoked to show off their impressive progress, and a few marketing people decided to under-emphasize the telepresence and made them all look like jerks.
I might be an idiot but it wasn't obvious to me. Watching the demo of the robot standing stationary, responding to a customer ask for (and point to) cellophane bags of chocolate and then the robot grab and pass it to the customer seemed like a reasonable tech demo to show at an event like this and it impressed me.
Yeah but they had the robots hi-fiving, pouring drinks on demand, chatting, playing rock paper scissors... fair enough you could get that idea if you only watched a very small amount of video, but that doesn't equate to Elon Musk hiding things from you.
I'd like to just say that Gwynne Shotwell might be one of the best executives in the world.
Shotwell has SpaceX catching rockets with chopsticks, while being able to keep Elon from f*cking it all up by "sleeping on the factory floor" or whatever other stunt he is pulling.
Tesla looks like a complete stock fraud sham for at least 5+ years (remember buying SolarCity because cousins?), then Boring and, Le Sigh.
Dude literally did a "We, Robot" event and then copied the "I, Robot" movie designs. He isn't even trying anymore, this is just his "rocket fuel" scam for whatever other shiny object he desires.
I'm super frustrated that someone set "good" things in motion, and we are letting them Mullenweg it all up.
man these demos are synonimous to slides and mockups by startup founders. they are intended to paint the probable future, the ideal end game user experience.
lots of people confuse it as the shippable product already. no sir, it's not like that.
Wasn't the last presentation just some dudes in spandex outfits? So... progress, I guess?
Figure 01 does the same thing.
It’s so funny to me when people still believe Elon when it comes to this or deadlines. I used to work for him and he always overpromises
Friendly reminder that in 2017 he was saying a car would drive autonomously from LA to NY in a year. It is now 2024 and that has not happened.
Friendly reminder that Tesla Semis are still not fully delivered and running.
Friendly reminder that the Roadster 2 is not rolling off the production line (people put down deposits too)!
It's perplexing because Elon is effective at fundraising and pursuing challenging and ambitious goals.
However now Tesla cars are protected by a 100% tariff on competitors, and Elon is campaigning for Trump who is now promising 200% tariffs on imported goods.
The gigapress sounded like a good idea when I first heard about it bc it could reduce manufacturing costs, yet Tesla does not seem to have realized any significant improvements in 2024 from it, and needs massive protectionist policies to compete.
It's interesting to imagine the price and performance we'd be seeing (and all the new dealerships and service centers popping up) of Chinese engineered and manufactured EVs if it weren't for the tariffs. Surely there would be some very capable options in the $20K range that would eat the Model 3's lunch. But Elon has government protection to the rescue and so he doesn't have to actually win at engineering or manufacturing, only lobbying.
You’re simplifying things a bit here. The tariffs are to protect all US car manufacturers (who all have EV directives) from BYD, who was strategically subsidized by the government to crush EV companies, including Tesla [1]. Tesla would be able to compete much easier if we were to throw out the environmental regulations and better utilize slave labor [2].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/byd-got-3...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/20/business/economy/forced-l...
That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
The fact that Waymo has lapped anything Musk has to offer made the entire spectacle cringey and sad.
...
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
Demos from just-about every single humanoid robot company are highly scripted and teleoperated (telechirs). Nothing new here.
Generally speaking, the only demos that are not of the scripted and human-in-the-loop kind are simple ones. Even food delivery robots have remote drivers. Warehouse and floor cleaning robots are probably the two main examples of reasonably autonomous operation in a relatively constrained environment. Welding and assembly robots just play back a script, not unlike a CNC machine.
Must've been a great night for the bulk of Hollywood's mocap actors!
I love all the "the fraud was so blatant it should have been obvious" comments.
Musk actually used this argument in his stock price manipulation trial, and the jury bought it.
Mechanical Turk Robotaxis! The civilian version of drone pilots.
Actually, I won't be surprised if it turns out that the 40 or so cybercabs were remote-controlled too.
It is clear they were in terms of starting off. But it was on a closed set - an undergrad could have coded what they showed.
Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.
There's a company in vegas that pilots a rental car to you so you can be picked up anywhere and when you hop out, it drives off. You rent by the hour or something like that
Waymo has been demonstrating fully self driving cars for years.
Teslas also do it, and truly necessary interventions are rare these days.
Waymos have some very advanced teledriving features, and it's not clear to me how often the human is involved when you ride a Waymo.
I sort of hope that it's not that often, but I also thought the amazon store was automated.
Waymo vehicles are not driven remotely. Remote assistants give the autonomy stack suggestions for how to proceed rather than drive the vehicle. This doesn't require a low latency connection and the robot is still capable of stopping when the situation changes or proceeding as soon as it's able to without a control handover.
Yes, they are not usually driven remotely, but an operator can take the wheel in an emergency situation. Most of the interventions are "this plan or that one?" decisions from the teleoperators.
That still isn't really "autonomous," but it's a lot closer than anything Tesla has done. My question, though, is how frequent the interventions actually are.
they already have that, it's called human-in-the-loop (HITL) assist. They usually take over when a problem needs to be escalated to a human agent.
I mean, that should have been obvious to anyone after calling it: [0]
The 'fake it till you make it' fraud will just make everyone building so-called AI companies look bad and heavily faked with events like this.
But there is still time for the Theranos of AI to reveal themselves. (It is not Tesla Inc.)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41805764
[dead]
No shit.
[dupe]
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
Hey Chris, thanks for your continued diligence. This is actually a recent and related discussion, as the duplicate status suggests the same article has been posted twice (e.g. slightly altering a URL parameter to escape the HN dupe-detector).
P.s. If you found the content in one article to be better than another, it would be helpful to steer folks towards the more informative one. In this case, the above Bloomberg article is pretty substantial compared to the one you've linked as a "dupe". Take care.
Dupe means duplicate discussion. There is an earlier discussion on this news story with plenty of upvotes and comments. Stop splitting up the threads, especially when it's a news story already developed from multiple days ago. Got something to add? Share it over there. Even maybe suggest the link over there in some cases even as a replacement article option. Stop splitting up threads and forcing us to repeat ourselves over and over. The discussion is over there.
[flagged]
I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"
I read that "probably some AI is used" as that it's human controlled. Otherwise it would have been "completely AI controlled" or something similar.
I think "AI" did control their walking. Although calling that AI is probably a stretch.
Balancing or some movement mechanisms could be using AI.
Why would they, though? Aren't those doable just with flat our regular code plus isn't AI slow?
AI is a pretty broad term - its been used for generations to mean something intelligent seeming that isn't human. Certainly, computers running precompiled instructions also falls in that category.
That's pushing the term beyond its limits.
Nobody reasonable considers ifs and dependency injection to be AI.
In video games a lot of these are considered AI though. Even racing cars adapting to a trajectory with some ability to overtake, correct, etc.
Those are definitely exaggerations for marketing purposes.
I find it incredibly silly that 20+ years after the first more advanced "AIs" in games like Half Life, we're still far from a point where I can fire up a game of Dota 2 with bots and have the bots behave constantly well at an intermediate level, so that I can turn Dota 2 into a solid single player experience (I don't have the time nor the patience, anymore, for managing a team of toddler brains for 30-60 minutes).