Optimus AI team lead is leaving Tesla.

So as money is not the reason for leaving it seems either the hopelessness of the project, the company as such or even Elon is his reason for leaving

Musk takes yet another fat L. Glorious.

The responses under his tweets and other threads discussing it are interesting. It's a mix of accusations that he got paid a fortune to leave (which he openly denied) or disbelief how could he quit on the cusp of optimus taking over the world. What the people commenting seem not to realize is that he has intimate knowledge on the state of optimus and him quitting is a strong signal things are not going well with the project. Meanwhile Elon is tweeting crazy stuff like that he will have optimus dance troupe with him on stage.

Por que no los dos?

Si.

He knows it's a pile of shit and isn't going anywhere.

Once you have "fuck you" money, it's hard to waste your life on something you know will fail, while also having a giant manbaby screaming at you to "Make it work! Make it work! Make it work!" This is the real reason Tesla will fail, because even if Elon comes to his senses, all the talent has already left.

?

Yeah, seems to head into that direction pretty fast

I can think a lot of all this talent leaving is because Elmo takes all the credit for other peoples ideas and hard work. Probably why people think he’s some Genius from the future. When it’s mostly other people that’s coming up with this stuff.

Yes because everyone knows, if you’re in it for the achievement and reward and not the money and your groundbreaking project is going as amazingly as Elmo says, of course what you’d do is leave.

That should pump the stock 10% at least

One of the few projects he came up with from start to finish, was Cybertruck. So there you go. Lol.

No way. Everyone is going to have 3 (musk promises) for over a trillion dollars or whatever

Progress was probably too fast!

Soon armies of them will be slowly showing us the way to kitchens!

Yeah seems more damaging to TSL mentioning it's not about money

That was clearly intentional

lol

"...or disbelief how could he quit on the cusp of optimus taking over the world." They're right, human level inteligent robots are the next step after not having a clue if there is coca-cola and shambling to the kitchen to find out.

Elon's latest demo of Optimus to the head of Salesforce had it take forever to respond to a basic question that had to be asked twice, and then shamble along towards a kitchen (?) to get a Coke half an hour later than the guy could have just got it himself. Obviously it would have never made it to the kitchen OR got the Coke for the guy. Lol that in the background of that video, at the end, Elon promises that it'll be moving faster soon. Might as well say it's going to fly Elon, why not?

Humanoids were never meant to be profitable or useful or even better than single-purpose industrial robotics. Anything the humanoid can do, can also be done more efficiently using a single-purpose automated machine.

Making an Optimus dance is so much easier, he can do that and it'll work well. It's just what works well to con investors, rarely translates to a good product.

You can only do so many 80 hours weeks before burning out.

All I want to know is when Optimus will be able to jerk me off

Stock goes up 10%

Maybe because elon is probably the worst person to have as a boss?

There is no evidence Optimus is better or worse than anything out there. None of them can replace actual humans, except in very simple jobs.

The post about the money is weird. Tesla pay is significantly lower than elsewhere looking on levels.fyi.

Yeah but it’ll dance like Elon…

Plenty of evidence it's a piece of shit. Try opening your eyes.

Nothing says "world-changing, infinite wealth producing, most successful consumer product in the whole history of civilization" like the resignation of the man who knows the product best.

There are also far better humanoid robots already out there, though…

I’m expecting fElon to ban Boston Dynamics videos from Xitter next.

\*paid

I love how there are people who are pissed at *him* for leaving for money. Fucking guy works for the richest asshole in the world, if he decided he wants to go somewhere else for more pay, it means said rich asshole didn't pay more to keep him. And somehow, that's Asheesh's fault? What world do these people live in?

Tone of some of this comments is as if he's a traitor. If that's not a cult I don't know what is. Guy literally decided to leave his job and people who didn't probably know of his existence prior to this are like "how dare you".

There were 280 companies entered into the Humanoid Robot Olympics a few months ago. Tesla was not one of them. To me, this says it all. They have nothing to show, aside from more of Elon’s fraudulent statements.

Thanks, fixed.

Didn’t Facebook have a disastrous AI demo as well?

Ask xAI where to find skinny people to fit into a robot costume

Absolutely, but the people getting bent out of shape over him leaving for money are next level stupid. I mean, I knew the old George Carlin saying about the stupidity of the average American, but they're a lot dumber than even I would ever have thought. The #1, 2 and 3 reasons most people leave a job - money, money, money. The same dipshits who were applauding the ridiculous pay package that Elmo had his sycophant board approve are somehow pissed at this guy for wanting more money?!

Especially a guy with a trillion dollar pay package can’t pay his employees enough to keep them. It’s a bad image for Elon. It’s a bad look for the new poster child for Tesla too.

No, it is a sign his work is finished, nothing left to accomplish, he is gonna ride off into the sunset and watch his TSLA shares make him a billionaire. /s

You joke but…. Seriously the 300 million dollar letter of intent to buy pumped the stock 300 billion.

Does this mean the sale of millions of these Optimus bots isn't imminent?

It’s ok the awesome robots will be coming next year for the next ten years

Yeah. ‘On the cusp of Optimus taking over the world.’ <snort>

Waiting For the Coke from the makers of Waiting for Godot

Robots barely able to do stuff your dad can do when very drunk!

It’s so stupid, are they going to put a pole up for the robot? Are they optimizing for tits? Who needs a dancing robot? The funniest thing about it is you can already get a dancing robot, it’s not even new. Get me a bot that can execute the laminate I’ll be doing in a few minutes, then assemble and sew the sample together without a week to program the operations and I’ll be impressed. Real robots do real things. Robots are everywhere in industry and science where they excel in precision and repeatability. We use them daily at my work. These guys are skipping a lot of steps trying to get to a humanoid who can do everything a person could. AI will have to get a lot better at things other than art and google searches to support that kind of cognition driven action. It’s a lofty goal, set by science fiction, that they are desperately chasing without considering whether or not it will help humanity because they don’t care. I Robot, is not an instruction manual. Asimov and many others warned these idiots about the dangers of AI and robots. Unfortunately when a guy like Elmo reads about the apocalypse he’s dreaming of being the king of Thunderdome.

>had it take forever to respond to a basic question  To be fair, that's probably the first time Optimus heard "Coke" used as a beverage around Elon. It was just confused and wanted to say: "why are you asking me about your coke, doesn't Jared Birchall always hold it for you?", but it had done enough machine learning to know not to say that out loud in front of strangers.

Translation: we tried a bunch of Elmo’s dumb ass ideas, they didn’t work and now I’m bailing for greener pastures.

Yes, Meta glasses, fail after fail

Boston dynamics robots are doing parkour while Optimus can barely shuffle in a straight line over a perfectly smooth level surface. Yup, they’ll be taking over the world any day now. /s

Yeah, they were trying to have it. Give the user a recipe for a Korean marinade for steak. And it kept messing up and coming in at the wrong point. Honestly, it was so cringe. I had to stop watching it.

Elmer Fudd😂🤪😂

I'll bet a dollar to donuts it doesn't learn from videos.

>Meanwhile Elon is tweeting crazy stuff like that he will have optimus dance troupe with him on stage. Dancing robots is easy. You could buy dancing robot toys 15 or 20 years ago. Just preprogrammed moves.

Like you can’t just google recipes?!?! I’m sorry but even if it had worked flawlessly, who fucking cares? What problem is this solving?

The smartphone already is the everything device. No need for anything else.

It’s sad, but these days you have to add /s so we know whether to take this comment seriously, or as a fun jab. Fun jab, I assume.

Fun jab, added /s for the people who miss out on the hopefully obvious sarcasm.

I figured … but geez, there are some numbnuts who really believe the sun rises and sets over Elon and his fairy tales.

A person replying to him: *You should optimize for humanity, not money!* Lol, he thinks working for Elen is **optimizing for humanity**?! Seriously, lol.

Optimus is lagging against competition, fuses have to blow

It’s trying to solve the problem of inflated stock prices.

Smart man.

Obviously. He was clearly the one holding back the success of flOptimus. Now that he's gone the project can finally take-off! /s

You can also thank him for a sterile interior without physical control, and squashing lidar. Truly an unparalleled genius.

Cooking and touching a screen don’t always mix well, so there’s something to be said for voice control.

I think they were trying to show that you could stand there and ask questions and it would walk you through it and it failed miserably. I don’t disagree with you, I google all my recipes as well.

It's too bad I can't just turn on "Hey Siri".

Google/Searching for recipes is legacy behavior, unless you like to read a short essay about why the author likes those cookies so much. As for the glasses, the demo failed but imagine this. You recently met a new friend, and you invited them over to your place. You know they are diabetic and will probably like a snack. You, not being a diabetic, don't know offhand what to offer. Legacy behavior - Google 'diabetic friendly recipes', you see a list of results, find something may be good, only to discover you don't have all the ingredients. You return to the search results and try another recipe until you find one that you can make with the items on hand. Current behavior - You use chatgpt "I have flour, eggs, peanut butter, bananas, chicken breast... (you list more items you have on hand). What can I make with this that is ok for a diabetic?" Future behavior - Wearing smartglasses, you open your fridge as simply ask, "What can I make with this that is diabetic friendly?" All three of these are versions of a 'search', but with the amount of work to get the answer you needed dropping as you go through the tech stack. Now is this worth $800? No.

Any idea who he is going to work for?

Was just looking at the dancing Optimus video that Milan Kovac posted just before his sudden exit. They claimed it wasn't sped up... and yet the robot may have been one of the most nimble robots ever shown from any robotics OEM. Other robots have certainly shown a lot of nimbleness and dexterity too, but given where Tesla was and where they suddenly appeared to be in that video, it just caught me as particularly strange. This type of movement from Tesla's robots have never been seen outside of these set of videos. In person has only ever shown a slow trudging movement and minimal dexterity. Of course, that could be the difference between a pre-programmed routine for the robot to follow with every movement already mapped, and a system that's able to use its neural net and software to figure out how to move and interact in a real environment, or a system that's using puppeteers behind the scenes to move the limbs... with some latency in the process of doing so. Kovac left, then soon after, I believe within a couple of weeks, Tesla announced they'd be moving to video based training, replacing motion capture training... likely meaning that a large chunk of their motion capture training team would be laid off. Maybe this discussion was happening for weeks or months prior to the announcement, with engineering efforts likely already underway, or maybe Musk once again caught his team by surprise with a sudden large scale change to the program. Now it looks like Ashish Kumar is leaving, and in his announcement, he's touting that he helped transition the project to video based training. That quick huh? (If it's true, then the speed suggests they were working on this prior to Kovac leaving) Whatever is going on there, it seems Tesla is hemorrhaging leadership in their robotics program. Maybe these folks were adamantly against moving away from motion based training. I imagine they worked a long time on it. Now they're claiming that within a couple of months of announcing they'd move away with it, there's an entirely new stack setup to do the training? Like just about everything these days when it comes to Tesla, something seems awfully shady about their robotics program, and oddly there seem to be minimal leaks coming through on what's going on at the company. Although, maybe that's just because Musk stopped leaking information directly to his formerly sycophantic EV blogs... like Electrek.

Elon: everything rides on the robots. Optimus AI Team Lead: Bye

Everything released by Tesla has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. They have been caught faking stuff in the past. Honestly I'm not even sure how video training works. It would seem to me that video only does not contain all the movements/balancing done outside of view. How could you train AI on how to balance if none of the balancing is in the training set?

So I am going to upgrade the Stocks price to 5500 a share

I am guessing he was pushed out. Figure AI seems to be way farther ahead than Tesla Optimus in terms of software.

Watch Elon Vibe the shit out of that thing he is probably the man that know the most about vibing in the whole world, and about manufacturing, and production scale, space, rockets, tunnels, meme coins, politics, child care and the environment.  I say invest he needs it, poor guy.

The backstory of getting gifted a trillion in dilution is that the people actual doing the work to get there should be getting 5x that

>Making an Optimus dance is so much easier, he can do that and it'll work well. Doing the shit better robotics companies did better 20 years ago.

Why dont I just ask them what their favourite snacks are and pick some up when I go to Walmart?

The switch from the classical stack to reinforcement learning sounds like a great move, but the pinnacle of Optimus' accomplishments seems to have been filling popcorn boxes at the Tesla diner, in slow motion, under human control and supervision, and it seems to have been indefinitely suspended from duties. Reinforcement learning seems like the way to go long term, but Optimus doesn't have much to show for it.

That is true but if we want a robot for domestic labor a generalist humanoid will be best. Having something that can vacuum/ operate the dishwasher and clothes washer / mow the lawn / dust the house using all the same tools and machines I have already purchased would be very useful. This coming from a huge elon hater, I don't think optimus will be the product that succeeds but there are undeniably use cases where a generalist humanoid robot is a good solution.

\> Elon promises that it'll be moving faster soon Of course it will be moving faster -- there is much less gravity on Mars.

I wish reddit would let me upvote you 100. You're 100 spot on. Not only would your friend get a snack that is diabetic friendly but they would also get their favorite snack.

I'm surprised the person with the glasses even has a friend if they can't manage basic communication.

There's no way it will work.

Not liking manager or boss is up there as well. Which applies to many Musk related departures

Many of the humanoid balancing algorithms and limb manipulation algos are a solved problem. I'm sure there are open source libraries with these algos, or licenses these companies to use from existing sources. None of these companies are starting from scratch on this stuff. That's why suddenly robotics companies showing state of the art robots are a dime a dozen. The training would be in the unsolved algorithms. In image recognition (objects and terrain), in how to traverse various landscapes, in how to identify and manipulate objects, in how to understand requests and perform specific tasks based on those requests... etc... For example... look at what Boston Dynamics is doing with Atlas where it's moving parts from one type of storage medium to another, or picking up objects from the floor. If you want these robots to clean a house, then they have to be able to identify that it's dirty and then what to do to clean it. How to put laundry into the washer, add soap, and start the cycle, then take it out of the washer and put it in the dryer, then from the dryer into the basket, then transport the basket to a room, then fold the clothes, then put them into their proper places... etc. Whether the system can be trained on video only ... I have no idea... but what's clear is that Tesla has shown little or arguably nothing in the way of the above capabilities.

>Current behavior - You use chatgpt "I have flour, eggs, peanut butter, bananas, chicken breast... (you list more items you have on hand). What can I make with this that is ok for a diabetic?" I think you seriously overestimate the accuracy of AI at this point. In short this approach might kill your friend.

as opposed to a chicken/banana/raw egg smoothie?

Is the chicken raw, too?

Joke's on you - you can walk faster in a higher-gravity environment.

No, it was the damn Wi-Fi! Meta products are perfect! It's always the Wi-Fi being bad while still being able to live-stream in HD perfectly. Yep. Wi-Fi.

It's solving the problem of just glancing at a written recipe for .05 seconds by needing to ask a computer to read aloud the directions over and over. Get with the times, Grandpa.

Yup. My shitty router is down maybe once a year but a trillion dollar company doesn't have a back-up or a back-up for the back-up. Somebody should make a cumpilation of all those epic fails. The Meta glasses, the broken "bullitproof" Cybertruck window, the Optimus "Coke in the kitchen" fail. Pretty sure there were some fails during the Robotaxi launch too.

Now you tell me! Good thing I didn't lay down a deposit on Optimus. There's probably not a lot of Coca-Colas yet on Mars for it to fetch anyway.

Tesla had to relocate their engineering headquarters back to Palo Alto after their “big move” to Texas. Somebody realized how many engineers would rather leave than live in TX and the brain drain wasn’t worth it.

I like the former.

Does anyone with a slither of common sense still actually believe this Optimus ‘robot’ thing is anything more than a complete sham??

Oh c'mon, they'll absolutely dominate the dancing robot market.

Imagine posting you're leaving your job and the audience is a bunch of stock pumping idiots. What's even the point?

This is, broadly, the problem the tech industry is facing. They're desperate to create the next smartphone-like product, something that everyone and their mother will pay for. Things like tablets, smartwatches, and VR all have their adherents, but they failed to become the next smartphone. The AR boosters' idea for such a product is just glasses that are also a smartphone. While there are some applications where glasses could potentially work better than a phone, it's obviously not such an improvement that everyone and their mother is going to start wearing them.

Imagine being the AI Team lead for a project with the sole purpose of bamboozling investors with fake demonstrations. Your entire job is to just exist and receive a paycheck so they can mention you when they scam VC investors.

Do you mean the whole team or just one person?

He is a manager. That’s all. Usually these people leave because they never wanted to be a manager. They want to tinker and explore not write evaluations and be a slave to timelines.

I mean you would think a tech company would have a private wi-fi just setup for the demo.

They fly now?

BD Robots are preprogrammed, too.

If i want to wait half and hour for someone to bring me something I'll just ask my kids. Its way cheaper.

Instead of just asking your friend what they’d like you would make them watch you interact with an invisible AI which doesn’t know their preferences and might hallucinate something poisonous? Really?

“Optimize for money” …what a douche

If it doesn't kill them the chicken and banana sundae will at least kill the budding friendship.

“Tesla is known to compensate pretty well” Since when?

You don’t leave on the cusp of success.

It’s laughable that these guys would blame the WiFi. First, it’s always DNS, and second, they are a huge tech company with massively scaled services and they want me to believe that they can’t build out a network for a demo?

Haha yeah, Elmo, say it will be equipped with SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, like your ultra-vaporware Roadster!

Or get a waterproof case…or do like the line cook I knew did and use a ziplock bag while at the counter…

Wet fingers still won’t register on a phone screen.

First sign of intelligence from the team

If money can't keep him, it's clear that Optimus is facing undisclosed hurdles that can't be solved with more money.

There’s like 5 billion out there right now if you just want to get a coke from the kitchen

Came here to say exactly that. Jesus.

I think you're understating the adaptability of AI. Yes I could easily find various recipes for a strogganoff. But it is fixed. I could ask AI to adapt it for a larger number of people, I could ask it to replace an ingredient, I could ask it to suggest alternative preparation methods if I don't have certain tools, I could ask it to estimate the calories for people on controlled diets, and I could ask it to covert the recipe into audio read by Bennedict Cumberbatch because he's my fave, or whatever. If you use AI like a search engine then its not going to add much additional value but if you apply it to specific circumstances it can be powerful

> The #1, 2 and 3 reasons most people leave a job - money, money, money. I suspect this is not true

He personally led the erasure of the world largest humanitarian aid agency that is predicted to cost up to 14m lives of the poorest people on earth. That is more blood on his hands than some of the very worst people in history.

But if I need to scale up a recipe, I don’t need AI. I need math. Simple, simple math. And before you say “not everybody knows how to convert, bla, blah…”. If you need a specific recipe and need to scale it up, using AI to convert 4 tsp to 8 is a waste of resources. It literally makes you dumber. And, if you are incapable of scaling up a recipe in your own, then you will have no idea whether or not the AI has hallucinated a measurement. In the end, most of the “use cases” for AI are mere parlor tricks.

I’ll been the contrarian here. Optimus performance is primarily a software problem. This is solvable and the lead is likely not making enough progress to keep Elon’s promises. Once the software achieves “good enough”, Tesla’s deep pockets and vertical manufacturing capacity will allow them to quickly fill an insatiable demand if the price is right. If it cooks, cleans, launders, mows, shovels snow, along with other household tasks, then is a vast market for an aging population willing to pay a few hundred bucks a month.

lol he's just applying his stupid fucking 'vision only' thing from the cars to this. It cannot possibly work and just like FSD the more cases, particularly edge cases, that get fed into it, the worse it will get

>while also having a giant manbaby screaming at you to "Make it work! Make it work! Make it work!" i assume you're referencing the time he literally did this when FSD almost killed him