Clip where Optimus admits that it is not autonomous

Timestamp is 7:31

Okay

Yeah aren't these things pretty much just glorified puppets? I sure wish Tesla would just, ya know, focus on making awesome cars instead of this BS.

Why did Elon even host this event? Makes everyone question if everything else was rigged too. Glad I sold before the event

Tesla is not a car company, so get use to the BS!

OMG and I thought Tesla was demoing their fully sentient AGI and starting their mass rollout of their robotaxi /s - Is this really the level of expectation people had? The event was an excellent product reveal and demonstration of what they are working towards.

Apparently. Everything is taken literal. Product ideas 20 years out are apparently promised today

Why would anyone think otherwise? this was a hardware demonstration...

There are tons of good use cases for having remote controlled robots doing dangerous tasks that could save human lives. Tesla could start selling those as soon as they scaled up production if they wanted to. Their goal is autonomy, but it has use cases already.

Water is wet

I thought everyone knew this already. They do have some insane amount of dexterity in their hands​

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People have been claiming it was end to end AI and attacking anyone saying they were remote controlled since the event.

Why not just buy when it’s been achieved or close to? Its underperformed the index for two+ years already

All their money is from that and the investors are balking at this “reveal”. So yes, it is.

I think you mean vaporware.

You’d be surprised at the number of idiots on Instagram arguing that it’s all AI and chatgpt doing the talking.

Lots of car companies do things like this. Honda does robots too. Mitsubishi does all kinds of random stuff. There’s something about pulling together a lot of engineers that cranks out side projects.

Willfully ignore all the other products then!

 Seriously though, did anyone not know that? Lol if they were able to be completely autonomous already then we’d have preorders being taken already

I’m convinced no matter what they demoed the general public would criticize and hate it.

Company makes 99% of their money from 1 product. Its pretty safe to ignore the other 1%. Tesla is just trying to cash in on the AI boom that NVidia blew up with. Best of luck to them.

Better than a person in suit.

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These people don't realize EVERY SINGLE TECH EVENTS are pretty much demoing their future tech. I haven't seen any that actually showcase their already in production products.

Yea, but they work :/

Because the stock market is as fickle as the development progress. We don't know when it will become real; but when it doest it won't ramp up slowly in a straight line. Best to just quietly buy the stock when you can and hold for however many years it will take. Seeing 50 cars driving across each other without difficulty is a good sign of how close it is.

Judging from other content creators comments people didn’t know. I just posted it here in case others didn’t know

I just posted this as I saw a lot of people not know they weren’t autonomous. IMO I just saw it as those animatronics at Disney. Not too impressive right now but might be in the future

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omg it’s a dude in a suit

Fluid animatronics have been a thing for years now. Boston dynamics approached their robots with practicality in mind: lifting heavy loads, being durable etc. Optimus wouldn't be capable of any of that.

A quick search through social media will reveal that sadly no, many people aren't aware.

This was my take away too. It reminds me of Spot, but it's able to do a lot of what a human could do assuming it has sufficient battery power. Spot actually is being used in a lot of industries today, and a human robot will be better at some tasks (and worse at others). One of my previous jobs would never be able to be done by Spot, but could very well be done by this robot with a pilot and would easily have saved money. Confined space entries (if they are not too complex for the robot) for example could be done by one person and with significantly less safety equipment on hand. That's absolutely huge, for anyone familiar with the term. Ignore all the lofty promises of what may never come in the future. If it ever comes, it'll probably be decades late anyways. The current product shown was pretty neat.

We’re at the same price from four years ago and the forward pe is double that of nvda without any major Fsd breakthroughs. This already seems like it’s priced for perfection.

The issue is trying to suggest they were something they were not. They needed to just be honest

lol, I am a software engineer, I did not believe this was real for a second

That’s what the robot wants us to think.

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While an interesting research project, creating a robot to be as human like as possible, seems to not make much sense commercially. Isn't the the whole point of creating robots to do things that humans can't do as well? Lift large weights, move at high speeds, create intricate things such as microprocessors? Not really sure that a robot than mix a cocktail is really helping society very much, we can do that just fine!

If people already knew they weren't autonomous, the actor wouldn't feel morally compelled to say he (pretending to be a fucking robot) is not "fully autonomous" attendees were not informed the robots were being teleoperated.

There have been several breakthroughs that could have been the one. I am confident that v12 was the real breakthrough that was needed. But there is still work to do before we get robotaxi. It is possible that the outstanding capabilities result in latency issues and so some other breakthrough is required; faster hardware. I've been buying the stock for only those four years and my holding is currently valued at what I paid on average, so I'm good at this point. Happy to hold.

It's not a rendered image so its not vaporware...

It was heavily implied. It was deceitful.

Tesla doesn't make 99% of their money from automotive, let alone one product. Their energy storage business already hit 12% of revenue with insane YoY growth and now has a higher profit margin than automotive. Many analysts expect it to surpass automotive in well under a decade. Of course, initially, that segment of the business wasn't profitable, and it took years to ramp to where it is now. I'm sure some years ago tons of people were saying that it was a waste of time and resources and that they should just focus on their automotive products. Sound familiar?

Can you give an example?

[https://global.honda/en/robotics/](https://global.honda/en/robotics/)

yeah, I saw saying in the self driving car subreddit that I hope they don't do anything that is actually a unique and good idea because everyone will hate it. personally, I think the future of self-driving cars is pooled taxis (like uber-pool) but with one fare in the back and one fare in the front, and a barrier between. I think that's the only way to get a SDC below the cost of owning a personal car. however, I was hoping Tesla wouldn't do that because then everyone would hate on the idea and others would avoid it. I was glad to see nothing particularly unique with their taxi or van.

they didn't suggest or imply it. maybe they should have been explicit about it, but it is obvious to a casual observer.

But they have only built 100 robots over 18 years. How is that “working?”

Ever seen the Shadow Dexterous Hand?

Why? The problem here is that they really didn’t demo anything…

Honda cars make cars, Honda power equipment makes power equipment, Honda robotics make….yeah you guessed it. It three different companies

I’ll wait until they submit for regulatory approval before buying, the opportunity cost is just way too high. Qqq is up 100%+ over the last 4-5 years

He gives you an example and it’s not good enough? What’s wrong with you guys?

Well…except none of what they revealed works as intended…

A useless robot that will "only get better" as you own it. Where have I heard that before?

Elon even said it would serve you drinks, not have someone control it to serve you drinks. More “corporate puffery” as the Tesla legal team would say

the point is that pretrained transformers (like ChatGPT) have an ability to interpolate and extrapolate from their training data. what that means is that you can give them a bunch of training on Geoffrey Chaucer and a bunch of training on bread recipes, and you can ask it for a recipe in the style of Chaucer. what that means with robots is that if you can give them a bunch of training data about how to pick up and handle different objects, they can see unique situations and extrapolate what must be done in this new situation that it has never seen before. the catch is that you need an insane amount of training data on doing all kinds of tasks. if you make a humanoid robot, then you can have the robot teleoperated and use the human movement as training data and the robot's variation from the training (motor speed differences, etc.) to create a digit twin so you can train faster and find flaws in the virtual environment much faster than the real world. here are some quick videos on some of the concepts [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET-MmoeSvXk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET-MmoeSvXk) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kV-rZZw50Q) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnpm-rJfFjQ) so the goal is a virtual world to train in, but to get a good virtual world, you need a good simulation of a real-world robot's actual movement. you could certainly start from zero and let the robots figure out how to do things, but then they'll do weird stuff like crab-walk around. if you get a ton of training data from humans, feedback from the real robot to how that remote operation works, then you can build the virtual world to generate synthetic training data. this is all just easier if the robot can copy what a human does, rather than a human using a joystick to control an arm indirectly. plus, a humanoid robot gets the advantage of a world built for the human form-factor.

In like 2017, Musk claimed that a Model S with FSD could drive unsupervised from NYC to LA by 2019 (iirc). So no, it was not promised today, it was promised around 7 years ago.

I haven't seen anyone. if you look deep in the fringes of reddit, sure, but you also get flat earthers, moon landing deniers, etc. etc.

Those robots will act dumb until they eat us alive.

There are/were a bunch of people here arguing it just 24-48 hours ago, too. Really shows you the crazy amount of willing self-delusion some people have about Tesla.

[It's honestly not very impressive as a puppet, no. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH33vNm5A9w) Motor-driven hands are pretty easy, hundreds if not thousands of them have been done before, and just basically needing to write the software is the hard part.

If you say you're building autonomous robots, and the you bring those robots to a demo event promoting your company's autonomous robot chops, and you bait-and-switch autonomy for tele-operation without telling your audience, then yeah, that's deception.

where?

Thank you for the thoughtful and detailed response. However I would think the ultimate solution would be to have AI design and build the best robots for the best solution. So you would have robots designed for cleaning, designed for cooking, designed for various forms of military usage sadly. Humanoids are diverse but sadly master of none.

That’s because it’s a sham

Yea people on social media are morons. I meant did anyone with 1/4 of a functioning brain think that they were a complete product already?

Yea and every jackass stunt has a disclaimer not to try it at home. Warnings and notices like that are for the dumbest of the dumb, I would hope that most people would have some brain capacity to know that, again, if the product was ready then they would be close to being released to market. If they were close to market then we would be hearing a lot more about them and I’m sure orders would be taken.

> just basically need to write the software. That's the hard bit.

I’m not mad about it, but I think the burden is on Tesla to say their ROBOTS are not fully robotic and are actually being controlled by humans.

But I just want to buy one robot and have to perform a diverse range of tasks, not to buy a new robot for every task

Such a weird coincidence that they all have the same name

You don’t understand company structures do you

I work with industrial robots and the appeal of universal humanoid robots is ease of use and low cost. AI training eliminates the need for programming by the user, and the natural mobility of a humanoid enables it to move from workstation to workstation, rather than be bolted to the floor and only performing at one workstation, thus reducing the quantity of robots needed. And like all robots, they work 24/7. Some tasks do indeed require specialized machinery, but a very large quantity of industrial and collaborative robot deployments are simple pick-and-place.

I'd guess that the actual timelines will be loosely aligned with the release of GPT-5 and GPT-6, for full autonomy and commercial viability, respectively, just based on the rate of progress in the industry.

There's nothing like a ridiculously expensive robot wasting away both computing power and its own components to mimic useless hand gestures. If they ever pull this off (and I highly doubt it), those robots wont behave like that at all.

Now do solar roofs.

Cool, like watching Dirty Tesla on Youtube. He is one of my favorites showing the good and the bad with his Teslas.

Everyone making a noise about this needs to understand this. Teleportation is to Optimus as supervised driving is to the cars.

Actually it was in 2016 he said it, when AP HW2 was introduced :) (HW1 was a standard 3rd party MobileEye which even to this day works better in some ways outside USA, eg. no phantom braking). And he said it would drive coast to coast without occupants to pick you up. Meaning it would somehow be able to chage by itself too. They did show the snake-charger and batteryswap around that time too.

But Elon just talked about autonomous robots, and said they would walk among you tonight. If they were not autonomous - then maybe the robocabs we also teleoperated? Could explain some of the new features we saw such as fully opening the doors automatically

Wait, you’re telling me it’s hard to make a robot that can do everything? It’s scary to be living in a world where people are fooled by this.

They're working to programmed "autonomous" cars driving with 5mph? Neat.

Why would the world only need robots that can do what humans can’t? Humanoid robots are difficult to make. Making them general purpose is even harder. But solve it in scale and you have created a new paradigm of work. Manual labor will be dead. The impacts are huge. Elon worries about Skynet, gives us 80% chance. I worry about society as a whole when 70% of humans become redundant.

That's exactly what Tesla wanted to be vague about. I wouldn't call those people full of self delusion. Not everyone has to know where AI is at the moment.

The only useful information

If you are emotionally or financially invested in a company which expressly bills itself as an AI company, whose CEO assigns the full value of the company to AI products, and if you take part in online discussion forums *about that company*, then yes, you absolutely should know where AI is at in the current moment, and whether you are being flim-flammed. More importantly: If you *haven't* got a good handle on the state of AI, you shouldn't Dunning-Kruger yourself into the conversation and insist this was totally plausibly automated when you have *no clue*, and are just believing what you want to believe.

Do people think the Robocabs were fully autonomous then?

While Tesla should have been clearer - I thought it was kinda obvious they were at the very least partially controlled by humans, though when some commented it was fully autonomous I did have my suspicion that it is possible (since maybe they knew better than me, I didn't look up at the event. But later understood it was controlled by humans most of the time). The point was more to show the physical capabilities of Optimus. Building a robot isn't just the software - it's the hardware too. Optimus' branch have put quite a good show there, showing the flexibility and capabilities of the current robots.

just ask him what is the 124 th decimal of pi. If it's ai it will answer immediately

Optimus was promised to be autonomous today?…

It's misleading and I would consider it false advertisement, but teleoperated bipedal robots with dexterous hands are a great achievement on their own.

Why is it idiots? It’s very vague and unclear how this is controlled and general population don’t understand where AI is at

That is because at a large scale if will drive the cost of services down. Anything that can be automated will become cheaper. And people can enjoy that service with low pay even. Like for example, an old folks home is damn expensive, and the caregivers regularly abuse the elderly there. But if you can provide cheap service with optimus, and they are more patient and wont abuse the elderly, its a huge contribution to humans. Robots like optimus already have the advantage of not having emotions and can do boring repetitive stuff without complaint, even if what they do is not impressive yet. And they can do it for a very long time without rest, just need the occasional charging or service once a while.

Regarding 70% redundant: We’ll all become artists or do other work long term, as has in the past when society changed from 90% farmers to what less than 3%? I imagine competing forces will balance out the transition short term so the pain isn’t as great.

Sounds like you don't, to be honest. Honda Motor Co., Ltd. operates as a single entity with different divisions and subsidiaries. They are separated for legal and organizational or regulatory reasons but they operate under the same umbrella. They share common ownership. Would you be happier if the robotics division became Tesla Robotics while still operating under the Tesla umbrella?

Actually there is a use case for not fully autonomous robots, think of anything hazardous for people to perform. We could even armor up the damn things for real hazardous duties like going into burning buildings or trying to put out a possibly explosive vehicle if not explosive itself! Heck they could be used in lots of places in this mode

The general public isn’t paying any attention to this. There are Tesla simps that act like this is amazing & Tesla haters that that act like it’s nothing. And other Tesla fans in between.  I don’t follow robotics closely, but this obviously needs both software & hardware.  We can see that the software is OK at performing these physical tasks even if the input is from Mocap instead of an onboard neural net. Of course we don’t know if they’ve spent 2 years focusing on pouring drinks or if it can do a large variety of actions.  And we don’t know much about the neutral net until we see it in action. Maybe it’s terrible, or maybe it’s decent but not ready for a public demo.  To me, there is no need to draw any conclusion here. I wasn’t expecting a robot for sale for another few years at least. And I’m glad they continue to make progress.

You are very short sighted, Tesla is not a car company

The use case for these bots even as puppets is huge, let alone if they become autonomous.

Nobody cares, it’s a demo, not the actual product. It’s not even the latest version. When it’s available then review it.

It's called progress. The motor functions were still impressive.

Come on man, it's really not that hard to imagine how such a robot could be useful. Even if just working on a programm or remotely controlled on very basic taks. The challange is to make them in volume and at reasonable price. And Tesla is very good at this.

That seems a lot less of a stretch, given that they were not doing anything the ones on the road aren't already doing... My guess is that they were heavily supervised though to avoid any mishaps.

Also, just because a robot was mo-capped doesn't mean you could operate it without it falling down. Because you are not getting feedback from the robots inner ear. These things must have a stable state which is autonomous (staying balanced) which is modified by the inputs of the remote user. Kind of like piloting a drone. There's a lot of programming going into keeping a drone stable and you are just pointing its pre-programmed motions in different directions.

Just ask ChatGPT to do it, like every other programmer this year, lol.

Musk needs it to *look* autonomous to please shareholders as car sales plummet. That seems to have been a massive failure though.

How could anyone come away from that thinking optimus is truly autonomous? or even remotely close to a viable consumer product. it's an R&D research project for the foreseeable future. It's neat they brought it out, but not sure why anyone is looking any deeper into it.

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> Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management, who was in attendance, expressed concerns about whether the robots were being controlled by humans or not. Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe went one step further, suggesting the display was a "parlor trick" demonstrating low-latency remote control instead of cutting-edge autonomous technology. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/debate-erupts-over-teslas-optimus-191239228.html

On one hand, yes, people should be informed. On the other hand, expecting corporations to not lie or misrepresent the core capabilities of their product isn’t _unreasonable_. We can say, “your should know the state of AI,” but none of us are working on the Optimus project, so we can only extrapolate and make best guesses. If Tesla had mentioned telepresence _at any time_, it would be more realistic for people to expect it, but even when they released videos with telepresence workers in the background of Optimus, they said it was training the model, not telepresence. Having a company at the forefront of these capabilities blatantly misrepresent them and their timeframes, then fall back on the “corporate puffery” defense, only to make the exact same statements at a data-free hype show containing technology billed as autonomy but using telepresence _isn’t a good look_.

Nobody is saying robots should only do what humans can’t do. The point is that the humanoid form is usually not the best form for any activity. It’s a good at a lot of things but master of none. A specifically designed cleaning robot will be better at cleaning than a humanoid robot etc.

Yes but why do the robots have to humanoid? It seems much better to design specific robots for specific tasks. The humanoid form is a great generalist but it’s not the best form for cleaning, cooking etc. Spending so many resources trying to mimic humans seems like a big waste.

Because its easier to program. Its just a matter of finding humans, copy paste their actions, crunch it with gpu, and a robot that can do a lot of task is born eventually. However, because the source you copy is human, you cannot use other form except the human form. If you use a non human form, it takes years to write the code for it to do complex tasks. So from a software effort point of view, its just harder, that is why boston dynamics and all the robot companies take years to develop, because they have to manually code the movement. This is the main advantage of machine learning, you let the nvidia gpus do the heavy lifting, but the other form you need to hire a lot of highly skilled people to work many hours just to do a few complex tasks.

Just listening to the robot speak you could tell there was a human behind it. Just a fun demonstration. I question intelligence of folks that may have come from that thinking tesla was showing off breakthrough technology.

I mean they easily could be for sure. FSD can handle what they were doing pretty dang well and they probably had extremely well-trained models for that specific area. They've never really 'shown' autonomous robots yet, they typically are either repeating motions or they're being individually controlled, most of their marvel is their dexterity at this point but that doesn't mean it's not impossible. Robotics is a far different field than autonomous driving.

I think dexterity wise for sure. People compare this to boston dynamics and stuff are kind of missing the point between the two, one is more specific to certain tasks that it can repeat over and over very well with an optimized design and may be incapable of anything outside of it but this is intended to be more a jack of all trades but master of none like a human is.

This isn’t a clip, I am not watching. A clip is like 20 secs. Do better OP

Pretty sure I’ve been seeing these at DisneyLand for the last 30 years.

> Just a fun demonstration. This isn't a high school makers fair. Musk told investors that "The way to think of Tesla is almost entirely in terms of solving autonomy and being able to turn on that autonomy for a gigantic fleet." even in the earnings call, so obviously investors expect Tesla to show developments in that field. Instead they got people remotely controlling and speaking through barely standing robots. A "fun demonstration" is what Boston Dynamics did when they made massive developmental leaps and showed their robots dancing, but also autonomously solving complex obstacles. > "If somebody doesn't believe that Tesla is going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company. And we will. And we are." > "We should be thought of as an AI robotics company. If you value Tesla as just an auto company — it’s just the wrong framework. If you ask the wrong question, then the right answer is impossible."

What is that video supposed to show about Optimus? I don't think anyone claims it's the only robot with motor-driven hands. However, that's not even the same class of robot. It would be much more interesting to see other humanoid robotic puppets with movements that are this human like.

Aight. Go look at Figure.

We already have a plethora of machines that do a lot of chores that used to occupy DOZENS OF HOURS a week like washing machines, dishwashers, etc But we still have a long way to go, and unfortunately the stuff that’s left is the hardest stuff to automate, or else we’d already have machines that could do it Stuff like folding and putting away laundry, taking out the trash, mopping the floors, and chopping vegetables. A humanoid robot, with enough dexterity and training data, can tackle the remaining tasks

No shit.

[Surrogates](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986263/)

I saw a thread on X where everyone believed that these things 100% autonomous. have they never heard of Disneyland? It was incredibly apparent that a real human was talking through it to anyone with a shambles of a brain.

They should've used RGB faceplate lights so people can tell at a glance when a Tesla Bot is being controlled remotely. The fact people can't tell human operators from the robot's own built-in systems is pretty concerning.

That my friend is a company structure 👏 well done figuring that out…just took a few hours. I think the shareholder would be happier…I really don’t care

Figure 2.0 looks cool, hand dexterity is less than Optimus and it looks less fluid or natural. That said, IDK if it's autonomous or a puppet.

>hand dexterity is less than Optimus and it looks less fluid Well yes, Optimus is cheating.

Well, you say that, but I don't think the "clicky" nature of Figure's hands is attributable to puppet vs autonomous. It is only 18 degrees of motion vs 22 with the Optimus. I am strictly talking mechanics, not software. Have you seen the video of JUST the Optimus hand moving? Amazing control. I'm only saying that it's incorrect to say it's not impressive, even while recognizing it's limits. Anyway, it's not really worth discussing further IMHO. Cheers.

Skip to 7:35 for the “I am not fully autonomous” line.

For anyone saying humanoid robots are pointless, that’s just wrong—there’s an endless list of things they’d be useful for. And as humanoid robots get more advanced and truly autonomous (which is happening, by the way, and pretty quickly), their potential only grows. Nvidia’s AI dominance is proof of that. There’s a reason why they’ve skyrocketed to a $3.3 trillion valuation in such a short time. It’s happening fast, and it’s all because the future of AI and robotics is shaping up to be massive.

To go back to the original question, why make robots that replicate human and do human tasks, instead of making robots that do tasks humans cant do: Is your point that we should have human like AI robots so that they could ”extrapolate” and figure out better ways to do the human task than what humans have been doing? Like finding out a better way to clean or something? In the very far future that could be possible I guess but that definitely isn’t the main goal of Optimus robots yet. They are just trying to get these robots to be able to do human tasks at all in the real world autonomously in the first place. Or is your point that human like robots are easier to make since training data for them can more easily be generated by using humans? That I guess could be true but not sure if it is in practise, since the real heavy training for RL agents is done in virtual simulations, as you say.

It’s all something we’ve seen before…so the progress is catch up at best

Please look up Honda Assimo from 24 years ago because the dexterity from Optimus was NOT at all impressive. Thankfully, Tesla did show off a hand at the event that is up to par with other modern robots (see Figure co.'s robot).

Have you seen Asimo (now 24 years old)? https://x.com/ElvisKYG/status/1576066315202138112

Easier to make since training is easier, and the human form factor generalizes best to a wide variety of tasks, since the world is built for humans

I believe parts of it are model driven (balancing and general movement) but the interaction is a remote human. If everyone focuses on the “AI” aspect of this product they are missing the massive benefit of this being a remote human platform. We aren’t ready for robots to be Firefighters, Search and Rescue, bomb squad. This platform with remote human control is very useful for many scenarios.

Then again, learning to do tasks as a human like robot and learning to control that is very hard since human skeleton is very complex with all the different rotating joints. Compared to a simpler robot designed to a specific task which has significantly less degrees of freedom and more clear path to learn the task. I see your point though.

The name of this subreddit begs to differ.

Exactly. If they said, "hey look what these remotely operated bipedal bots can do!" then that would be really impressive. But the fact that they misrepresented it is kinda lame.

We already have remote controlled robots that can perform all sorts of useful tasks. None of them are human-shaped because being human-shaped is completely unnecessary in most cases. This is just more futurism BS for dullards who want Star Wars to be real.

Isn’t this crime that Elon is selling false promises to investors.. similar to Nikola?

Negative, human shaped means human jobs, which is what we want. UBI combined with automation, we can finally start to remove humans from the workforce.

OK, so the Optimus autonomous robots were actually being remotely controlled by humans, but the robotaxis were actually autonomous? Right. Funny how "summon" was just released recently.

No? Machines have already been taking away human jobs for centuries and none of them were human-shaped. It's genuinely silly to think what Elon is doing here is meaningful in anyway. It's just a gimmick to impress investors.

I think it's partially intentional, not only to show the public what is possible but was likely used as early crowd situation training data that you can't get just doing internal training in closed off test areas.

And this is the *second* time they've done this! When they first announced it I was so bummed to learn that dancing robot was a human in a costume. Fool me once, shame on... shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again.

Welp, as an owner, I can tell you that is definitely true. Whether any particular feature (I'm guessing you are a non-owner talking about FSD, as that seems to be the only thing that casual non-owners ever seem to talk about) is getting better fast enough is a different question. And, uh, FSD is most certainly not useless. Stop watching so much Thunderfoot.

To add on to what u/Current-Letterhead64 was saying, the world is human-centric. Sure, you can make very specific robots to do very specific things, and you can engineer for that very specific problem a particular form. But that is really expensive and difficult. By using a human-form robot that is generalized to be able to do whatever humans can do, you turn what was a hardware problem into a software problem. Every time we have done that in the past, industries have exploded. It's simply easier and cheaper to write software than engineer hardware.

It's very unlikely that many people will become artists. Take music, one of the most popular and widespread forms of art, as an example. Even among competent musicians, only about 10% can make a living doing it full-time. So, at best, maybe 10% of people could realistically sustain themselves as artists—assuming everyone even has the necessary artistic competence, which is highly unlikely. The real number would probably be well under 5%. Also (addressing "other work"), if we're looking at history, consider what happened as farming jobs declined from 90% to 3%. That transition was not smooth—it led to widespread economic disruptions, food shortages, social upheaval, and even civil conflicts across societies. It took generations for the workforce to adapt. The shift was far more tumultuous than the simplistic narrative of industrial progress might suggest. The world did not skip straight from the industrial revolution to 1950.

>Of course we don’t know if they’ve spent 2 years focusing on pouring drinks or if it can do a large variety of actions. If the only thing you ever saw was this clip, ok. But of course we know what they have been doing, because they've shown us. I also think you meant to say "neural net". Granted, we don't know what exactly they are doing with AI/LLMs with Optimus, but ChatGPT has shown that LLMs can integrate with more than just written text. While we don't know precisely where Tesla is at right now on this, the AI team and hardware at Tesla is top notch. If they don't have it now, that's probably because they have other priorities, not that they cannot do it. Otherwise a fair comment.

Actually, no. It is not what we have seen before.

It's the same people who were whining about the dancing "robot" a couple of years ago.

>Just listening to the robot speak you could tell there was a human behind it. The way they spoke is perfectly in line with state of the art right now. If you think \*that\* was the giveaway, you are about a year behind the times. I happen to agree that I think they were remote controlled, not because of any major technical roadblock, but because Tesla would not have wanted to take any chances with so many people around. Also, if you are looking for the \*real\* technical issue, I would concentrate more on how well the robots were able to distinguish between dozens of people all yelling at them at the same time. That is the bit I am not sure about at all. I know there have been demonstrations of up to 20 people yelling at an AI, but those were controlled environments, and not a real world situation.

Agreed, where? I have seen plenty of people (on here as well) attacking people for thinking it \*was\* fully autonomous. But I don't think I have seen a single attack in the other direction. And yeah, I do think it was remote controlled, but not for the rather silly reasons I have seen thrown out there.

What is you have not seen of what was featured?

Humans won’t be writing the software or designing the robots much longer. Sure we will have inputs to the process. But that will be one of the first major outputs of AI. The ability to design and create itself.

Why don’t they just say it straight? “We don’t want to release a robot that is still going through tests, in a crowd, that isn’t wearing any safety equipment and has no training.” “It demonstrates the capability of the machine and whether a human or AI controls it, won’t matter for capability.”

You aked the question and you got an answer. While I agree that AI will become an increasing part of the design process, the point where it is as automatic as you think is still some years off yet. And even for AI, software is easier than hardware.

Can you share reading that discusses more about this? Economic disruptions and the other nasty effects weren’t unique to just the industrial period. Rome, for example, faced a bunch of those and they were far more agrarian. So, how do we know job obsolescence was a root cause for these effects vs say other forces of the system?   My artists comment was if you take automation to the extreme limit, if work became Optional for humans, what does that society look like?  I imagine it’s passion projects like those who have already retired or retired early via FIRE

I have several expensive robots in my home that all specialize in a task, like a lawn mower, vacuum, litter boxes, etc. They all do well enough but can't problem solve, and they lack physical actuators to do anything except their bare minimum task. If the lawn mower gets stuck on a stick, I have to go help it. When the litter robot gets full, I have to empty it. What if you could have one complex general purpose robot that replaces all the others? We're surrounded by tools made by humans for humans. If you can build a robot that can do human things, then you instantly leverage a world full of our tools. All the chores in the house done by one machine using basic human tools. A personal trainer, house cleaner, gardener, grocery shopper, lawn care specialist, honey-do list completer, etc... all in one robot that demands no salary. That's just the *basic* version of what you could do. This could replace virtually any human job. Line cooks, nurses, assembly line workers, construction, landscaping, etc... Replace years of R&D to develop a highly specialized robot with weeks of training a humanoid robot, like you would a human employee, except this employee can upload its knowledge to its robot peers instantly and demands no salary. Clearly, humans can't do everything. A human can't be a steam roller, or a crane, or a cargo ship. These robots would be similarly limited. But humans are immensely flexible, and that's what these could be. That's the dream, anyway. Whether or not modern AI and electrical actuators are up to the task at an affordable enough price is still to be seen.

Just pick up any of the standard textbooks handling the Industrial Revolution, and you'll be good to go. But if you want an example, we know that when farm jobs started to go, more people started moving to cities to find work at the new factories going up. We are \*still\* feeling the consequences of this, including demographic collapse and the financial and societal problems \*that\* is starting to cause. But the more immediate problem was a major relocation of power from the land to the cities. Just one consequence of this was the consolidation of German mini-states into Germany \*and\* the increasing real power Germany began to wield, even as they were politically shut out due to a system set up when Europe looked a lot different. WW1 was at least partially caused by this weird political situation, where the most powerful country on the continent was not really part of the political structure. And while it has been hopelessly overstated, the amount of people thrown into poverty because their skill set no longer fit what was needed was enough to cause revolutions and dictate a lot of the literature. I don't doubt that there were similar issues in Rome, but the speed and the breadth of the industrial revolution is pretty much only something that we know from the 18th century and onwards.

All of this stuff is years off still. To what level the Optimus robots were controlled by humans is unclear but there’s still many years to go before they are autonomous.

They are being teleoperated, but what about the voice? Is it actually the operator talking or not?

Teleoperated humanoid robots with substantially-human hand dexterity. If/when it is strong enough to do trade work, 40+ year old tradesmen with bodies wrecked from decades in the field can put on a VR goggles and gloves, sit back in his recliner, send the robot out via cyber cab and get work done without destroying their bodies. Lowes/home depot sends loaner tools and parts via drone and suddenly that tradesman becomes 2-5 times as efficient because they don't need parts or travel time.

You’ll have to show me a source because every voice system I’ve seen is delayed to respond and unnatural, its tone never matches the tone of the conversation, or the cadence. People are reading hard into this when the technology isn’t for sale and won’t be for a long time. It was a demo. I was more impressed by the robots smoothness than I was its interactions.

Basically an expensive Furby?

Right? That plus doing high-risk jobs or being able to do jobs faster by not need to adhere to strict safety standards. Or robot-only clean-rooms. Or building and maintaining equipment in space and Mars. Tons of uses. Don't want one in my living room though.

Chill out there man, already trying to jail Elon are we? Have you purchased one and looking to sue for damages or some shit? At the beginning of the live stream a wall of text was shown where everything is regarded as "forward looking statements", basically these are all concepts and not finished products. Nothing says a company cannot pitch ideas and concepts to gauge a reaction from investors and the public.

This is a statement, not an admission.

Really incredible achievement on teslas part. Nice to see some footage of them up close.

People like you have been proven wrong so many times in history.

It was quite clear to me that these event was presenting prototypes and ideas of what they are working on, I don't see the misrepresentation angle people are whining about. Where did Elon stand on stage and claim that the Optimus demos/prototypes were fully autonomous?

If they or another company pulls this off the robot will behave as it is told to behave. If you want it to make shadow puppets and rave dance all night, that will be up to you

It doesn't really matter because they were presenting a concept, not a product launch.

Just learn the difference between a concept demo and a product launch, I guess.

Robots are not and will not always be humanoid form. But there are many situations where humanoid form would be useful, and so there will be robots that are humanoid in form.

Still a huge market for piloted robots. Military and hazardous scenarios. Also imagine sending bots to mars and being able to pilot them, even though there'd be crazy lag. Also travel. You could borrow a robot in another country and go visit people, things. Lots of use cases.

How is a guy dancing in a suit a concept demo? What’s it demoing? Their ability to make a suit?

Wanna bet?

Yeah that’s what I was thinking. Imagine having the “essence” of another human in there with you and asking him to help around the house. Come on dude. This is next level scifi stuff. AI is ok and we shouldn’t be expecting it to be like a self aware entity as Hollywood has dreamed up.

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Except robots like this won't actually be useful until they're actually a self-aware entity as Hollywood has dreamed up. Unless you're cool with having some dude in India remotely controlling your household robot that does the dishes and the laundry. You could just hire a maid for less.

So with this logic a Mitsubishi Mirage with a wrap looking like a Tesla will be perfectly fine for a Model 2 concept announcement?

Its not. Figure AI already has 2 models that are fully autonomous. Also why in the world would you buy a teleoperated bipedal robot when you can just do it yourself. Purpose of technology is provide efficiency.

We already have that lol. Non fully autonomous robots already exist and have existed for years.

You're missing the bigger picture. We've built everything around us for human traversal. Unless you want a robot that's restricted to a certain area, it needs to have legs and arms.

For example to work from home, either without a reason or for example for people with disabilities, or for environments that are not conductive to human life like space, radiated environments, or otherwise contaminated areas, or for Mars. In the end, this might also be an efficient way to test dexterity, integrity, connectivity, and generate tons of quality training data. Most likely, while the teleoperation functionality was ready, they couldn't get full autonomy to work in time for the event.

The military already uses drones. They are not human-shaped. We already use remotely piloted robots to deal with hazardous materials. They are not human-shaped. We have already deployed rovers to explore the surface of mars. They are not human-shaped. And why would you remotely control a robot to visit someone when you can, ya know, just call on facetime? Besides, once we develop systems to comfortably control remote surrogates, why would we settle for piloting robot bodies confined to the physical realm when the same systems can instead be used to control virtual avatars capable of traversing the limitless wonders of cyberspace?

Ah yes, because Tesla cars are famously affordable.

Actually they are now. Cheaper than the average in the US and way cheaper to run. Used Teslas are also cheap now.

you obviously refuse to use your imagine. So no use arguing.

You're putting the cart before the horse. To me, building robots in various shapes and sizes and forms depending on their function is much more imaginative.

Those dance moves…

And anyone who doesn't think Elon was counting on these idiots to spread misinformation that would boost his stock because he withheld this information, is also an idiot tbh

The smooth hand movements are pretty damn good. I also see major improvements in how it walks, including more rolling of the foot. The bot itself appears to be quite light for what it is able to do. But I'm sure you are just going to tell me "nuh uh", so this is probably a good place to stop.

human shapes means you can put them where humans go. you don't have to design logistics or ergonomics around the machine. Human robots are for doing human things that humans don't want to do. If you want to do someone specific for a specific purpose yes you build a machine for that specific thing it will be 10x faster. But for unspecified tasks that you also want a human to have the option of doing a human shaped robot is best. It's a general purpose robot. The robot can be repurposed for other general human tasks. without have a mechanic or technician replace parts because the part was too specific for the job. It's why manufacturers use robot arms. instead of just building a specific conveyor or loading system. Robot arms are general purpose and can go anyway. Specified machines are single function.

Right. A SINGLE robot limb is already extremely versatile and can be programmed to perform various specialized tasks. Making a human-shaped robot with four limbs, a head, functioning hands, and the degree of general intelligence necessary to be useful is not only still not feasible, it's complete overkill. What Elon Musk is doing is not serious robotics or serious automation.

I think it's fine to mock people for still taking Tesla's word for anything.

What better design could you have for a general purpose robot meant to be universal and also fit where humans fit? Any variation in that and it's too specialized to be general purpose. It's going to be prevented from being able to do some normal human task because of the variation. Yeah the head shape could be different, and the arms could have 3 joints or something silly, but the form factor is still roughly the same. I don't think you're considering the full ramifications of designing something not human shaped. Give one example of a variation in design outside the general form factor of a human and I'll give you something the robot can no longer do without something else being modified to accommodate it.

Never say never. Mathematically you are guaranteed to be wrong over a long enough timeframe.