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Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the diff

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like iterative design for rockets), to capture markets that were ripe for disruption because they were controlled by a few large players who had no real incentive to improve. Problems like level 5 self-driving and humanoid robots, in contrast, are different. We don't see these things because they are hard problems that require basic technological breakthroughs that may not yet exist. Self-driving is one of those things that's relatively easy to get 95% of the way to, but that last 5% is nearly impossible. And useful humanoid robots are probably a generation or two away from being possible; there are just all sorts of fundamental issues like energy storage, object manipulation, locomotion, etc, that are all so far beyond the current state-of-the-art that they're almost science fiction. I don't see this happening in any useful form in the next 5-10 years.

zippy5 5y ago
He replaced his marketing department with a R&D department. It really doesn’t have to work, just keep the believers believing.
deleted 5y ago
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rococode 5y ago
I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a different story in the press for the sake of fundraising and PR. I think he's really got figured it out tbh - as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It's like he's reserved a spot for his company to exist when the tech exists. His team doesn't necessarily have to be the one actually making breakthrough innovations in order to be in a good position to reap the advantages of said innovations.
- CommieBobDole 5y ago
  That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that. If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.
  - OnlineGladiator 5y ago
    > If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
    - pontusrehula 5y ago
      I think industrial robotics is a well established and profitable field.
      - weego 5y ago
        Industrial robotics focuses on single task, highly specialised machines that have few constraints on form, size etc. This is not that. What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
      - squarefoot 5y ago
discodave 5y ago
Or, he likes press releases to distract from other ahem, issues that Tesla has. Like the current court cases about their "self driving" technology. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/tesla-autopilot-self-driving-false-advertising-germany.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/tesla-autopilot-self-driving...
- maxdo 5y ago
  was my initial thought, from the comments in the video, it's clear they didn't think deep enough about Robot application. So I guess the main goal is to make politicians be busy thinking of universal income instead of BS like "naming of the autopilot". By the time government will decide something in this trials autopilot will be 4-5 generation different software they trying to evaluate. Aren't that first signs of singularity?
imron 5y ago
> I don't see this happening in any useful form in the next 5-10 years. The way it will get to a useful form after 5-10 years is projects like this.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  Projects like what? They have nothing but a person in a leotard and a silly slide deck. Meanwhile other companies have been actively working on the problem for years.
x-shadowban 5y ago
I would like to see him run a hospital and maybe put a dent into the problem of the $200 aspirin.
- mzkply 5y ago
  talk to congress. it's a policy problem.
- simondotau 5y ago
  The underlying cause of the problem of the "$200 asprin" isn't a fundamental problem of healthcare, it's a fundamental problem of the wacky health system of the USA which is—I assure you—the envy of no other first world country. While it is true that the US health system excels along certain narrow metrics (it's particularly well optimised for providing cutting edge care to the affluent) it is poorly optimised for serving the needs of the median citizen. And it's a dumpster fire when it comes to distribution and affordability. The solution exists, and that's to stop doing the broken thing.
- tigershark 5y ago
  How on Earth you guys pay so much? Aspirin is 1£ for 16 caplets or less in every supermarket.
  - josefx 5y ago
    Inflated Hospital bills that are usually dealt with by an insurance, so most people never see that $200 line.
lazysheepherd 5y ago
Have you even watched the announcement? Has anyone commenting here did? He clearly said the bot v1 won't do more than carrying simple things and will be super slow and weak. It will only have very basic grasping hands, even likely with 3 fingers. It will be what grasshopper was to Falcon 9. And about autonomous driving, Tesla autopilot seems to be almost as good as Waymo, except with pure vision. And I'd bet a great sum Tesla will move faster forward.
- fragmede 5y ago
  which, anyone naysaying bot v1 doesn't see it. Think about moving a dishwasher. Up and down stairs, over and across pathways which are just a little too narrow for the furniture dolly so it keeps riding into the dirt. The target market for v1 is going to be slim, because I bet it won't be cheap. But it will be endlessly useful, and doesn't need to solve really hard general AI grade robotics problems, just some computer vision things, and without the self-driving car crashing penalty. The question is: how much? Price it too high and the market just isn't there. Furniture dolly's don't have the same cachet as sports cars. I'm hopeful, because the technology is so close.
  - qaq 5y ago
    Just based on novelty factor and number of millionaires in the world if it's 50-80K they prob can sell more than they can make
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  > Tesla autopilot seems to be almost as good as Waymo Tesla's system is better, if only because you can buy it right now. Waymo has sold exactly zero of their cars, and they don't even have a plan to do that any time soon.
  - shawabawa3 5y ago
    Waymo isn't a car manufacturer so of course they haven't sold cars They're selling rides in phoenix though
justicezyx 5y ago
No no-no This type of reasoning simply does not understand the market competition. Once there is a market, the goal is to win the competition, not to hit some technical bar. Is there a better player in the industry in building humanoid robot? I rarely see any that is better than Tesla. Modern cars are essentially a robot, or the closest thing in tech stack. Is Musk stretching himself? Of cuz, that's how new things are created...
- imron 5y ago
  > Is there a better player in the industry in building humanoid robot? Boston Dynamics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  Boston Dynamics? They've been working on such things for years and they're still very much in their infancy.
  - mlajtos 5y ago
    AFAIK they were avoiding deep learning like the plague for the locomotion. I don't know if something has changed, but that's why the progress was slow.
    - spiderfarmer 5y ago
      Which is interesting given recent developments in AI motor control: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/08/1022176/boston-dynamics-cassie-robot-walk-reinforcement-learning-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/08/1022176/boston-d...
- mhh__ 5y ago
  What does better mean? I assume not the fit and finish of these "robots"
blueblisters 5y ago
Counter-argument: I remember seeing a talk by Andrej from a year or two ago and wasn't too impressed - it seemed like they had a huge amount of work left to do and put everything together for a reliable self-driving AI. Everything they showed today, from the vision models to the path planning to labeling to simulation was bleeding edge. And they seem to have managed to put everything together in what appears to be a tremendous engineering effort. I can't see why they can't use a similar playbook for the humanoid robot and increase value over time. The vision framework they used for self-driving is fairly general and can probably adapted to humanoids. The action policy space is less re-usable but I suspect they have clever ideas on how to tackle that. Musk may be bad at forecasting but he's darn good at selling stuff that half-works and then assembling a team that can execute on his vision.
- itsoktocry 5y ago
  If it's bleeding edge, why does it underperform the competition?
  - blueblisters 5y ago
    I'm speaking from my knowledge of the specific technologies they are using - it's fairly close to SOTA. I'm not aware of an apples-to-apples comparison of Tesla's autopilot with a similar system from the competition. Most competitors are using LIDARs and/or running their autonomous vehicles in limited geographical regions. IMO, the state space and action space is significantly more constrained in those cases.
    - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
      Having the ability to use LIDAR and not just cameras is less constrained, not more.
FireBeyond 5y ago
Right. I mean how many years has Boston Dynamics been cranking at 'teaching' a robot how to walk like a human, and it's still a work in progress? But of course Musk is going to bust it out in the next 16 months at most. Just like FSD, "this year", "this year really", "this time we promise we mean this year", "this year, seriously folks".
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Boston Dynamics has made some pretty incredible progress. The very first videos had Atlas and Spot "walking" but really more like controlled tripping. It was cool and impressive, but definitely in line with my idea of what was possible in robotics. The most recent video has Atlas doing parkour. It's skin crawling. It looks fake. It can jump and flip better than I ever could. It is suddenly out of step with what I ever thought a robot would do. Conventionally, I would agree that this sounds like an insane overreach from Musk, but it feels like the ground is shifting under my feet and the previously preposterous is becoming suddenly possibly with increasing frequency. Anyway, better that it gets me my groceries than hunts me down through the forest.
  - moogly 5y ago
    > The very first videos had Atlas and Spot "walking" but really more like controlled tripping To be fair, human walking is often described as "controlled falling".
csmeder 5y ago
Haha, and then in 10 years when He announces X you will say: “since he’s had great success in pioneering self landing reusable rockets, starting a colony on Mars, pioneering the EV market, pioneering Robo taxis, making the first commercial humanoid robots, moving traffic underground, adding computers to people’s brains, he has now fallen for the idea that he can easily repeat that success in other areas like X” This is going to be a good thread to come back to in 10 years. Maybe I’ll be completely wrong and need to admit I was foolishly optimistic in Musk’s ability, however, my guess is the parent comment will be hilarious/absurd in hindsight.
- TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  I'm bookmarking this comment in my browser. Given how rarely I clean my bookmarks, I'm sure I'll still have it in 10 years to visit. Naming the bookmark "Open 8/19/2031"
  - csmeder 5y ago
    See you in 2031!
- bserge 5y ago
  Yeah, yeah, but aside from all that, what has Musk done for us?
  - libertine 5y ago
    He provides entertainment for "nerds" like us, to the point of creating feud and division. And he knows it. Just to be clear it's nerds from tech, finance, auto, etc.
  - moogly 5y ago
    He's making us all look on the bright side of life?
  - pyinstallwoes 5y ago
    I don't know, maybe Space industry, rockets, and AI?
sergiotapia 5y ago
We said the same thing about movement in robots -- and today we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk Just ridiculous how far things have come, it seems fake it's so far along.
derefr 5y ago
> Self-driving is one of those things that's relatively easy to get 95% of the way to, but that last 5% is nearly impossible. But there are niches for which 95% is just fine. E.g. autonomous trucks driving through the Nevada desert with manual remote-control during the first and last mile. (Like handover from plane autopilot to ATC-driven landing, basically.) > in any useful form It doesn't have to be useful; it just has to be better than whatever Toyota is selling, to win long-term robotics development contracts. (That probably won't be contracts for humanoid robots, mind you. The humanoid robot is likely a halo product to sell e.g. robot arms.)
Ekaros 5y ago
And then you look at some other things he has part-taken in, like Boring company and ask question how is this in anyway better than what we already have, by any metric... And I won't even go to Hyperloop, which he had sense not to spend money on...
gerash 5y ago
Tesla FSD might end up getting good enough after a hardware upgrade in 5 years or so. The humanoid seems at least a decade or two away. That said, I truly enjoy that he's investing time and money in these futuristic sci-fi projects rather than trying to optimize the next quarter earnings.
- mempko 5y ago
  Most projects of his use government funds. I wonder if this will too.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    The US government has something approaching a 100x return on R&D investment in the US economy…
    - mempko 5y ago
      Exactly. We socialize the costs but unfortunately privatize the profits. Americans should get stock.
senectus1 5y ago
If he surrounds himself with the right people and sticks to his spacex production rules: Step 1 Make it less dumb Step 2 Delete a part of the process - If you're not adding step in 10% of the time, you're not deleting enough Step 3 Simplify or Optimize Step 4 Go Faster Step 5 Automate He may very well excel yet again...
ButtSpark69 5y ago
would you rather he not try?
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Energy storage is one of the most problematic aspects. These guys will need to be heavy to be useful for more than a couple of minutes. This creates additional challenges (like quickly moving toddlers). I bet early adopters will be people without small kids.
rmst 5y ago
It doesn't matter if this isn't happening in any useful form in a reasonable amount of time. It's still great for hiring and funding. He has used the same hiring technique since x.com: 1) announce overambitious, relatable, unoriginal goal (e.g. human settlement on Mars) 2) present vague, relatable, unoriginal strategy (e.g. reusable rockets) 3) hire people 4) actually have them work on more incremental stuff (e.g. launch provider services) 5) profit
- libertine 5y ago
  My opinion on Musk changed with the whole crypto pump & dump thing, for the worst ofc, but those public announcements with ambitious goals are key for his achievements and to get the right people to work on those problems. There's a lot of people here that apparently don't like that him for saying things lightly, and to pose complex problems as trivial problems - but isn't that the driver to break those barriers and challenge that type of barriers such people create. "Oh no, this is a whole different problem he shouldn't dare to say this!" Except he should, and if he gets the right people involved with the right motivations and funding they might actually do something. How can they fail? Even if it take them 10 years to do so. People shouldn't underestimate the power of those bold statements, for example Musk said in a recent interview that Tesla probably has the best material eng. team in the world - and the thing is that they might not be the best, or the smartest, but they sure as hell are contributing to the leap of Tesla over everyone else. Will people drop from Boston Dynamics to go work for Tesla? Why not, if some don't agree with the status quo, or because they think that things should be done differently and BD isn't willing to pursue that because they're too invested into their own thing. So this should be celebrated, more people working to solve this is the right path.
- elurg 5y ago
  Launch services are in fact the most important problem to work on for a human settlement on Mars and SpaceX is making useful progress towards it. SpaceX is following their vision very precisely.
jondiggsit 5y ago
It’s an ad for talent… get it now?
machiaweliczny 5y ago
For me it seems Musk has ability to hire competent people because he can verify if you are bullshitting him down to physics. This and being bold and rich and persistent is enough for success it seems. Ah, also marketing/vision to get (more) money.
inglor_cz 5y ago
The border between "improving existing technologies with innovative engineering" and "technological breakthroughs" is pretty murky, though. For example, Raptor engines are the first Full Flow Staged Combustion engines to ever fly and they should be cheap to manufacture on top of that. Orders of magnitude cheaper than other rocket engines, with target price tag lower than a million USD per piece. By my standards, this is a breakthrough. By your standards, this may just be innovative engineering. We can both argue our positions plausibly. I can definitely see applications of having at least semireliable robots on Mars or Moon, though. For starters, they need not mind the vacuum and the radiation.
danf1 5y ago
I was skeptical when I saw it, even as a long time fan. But I thought is using all money capital, _human_ capital and trying really hard to "repeat that success in other areas" such a bad thing? It doesn't seem so, but the despair in comments like these sound very smart, i'll give you that.
loceng 5y ago
Your conclusion made me chuckle: 5-10 years isn't very long to get to a mass produced general purpose robot that's useful; and as Elon said they already make all of the components necessary - including aggressively working on AI including for visual systems - so they arguably only have refinement left and edge cases to figure out next - not a small feat but puts them 10+ years ahead of anyone who will try to copy them re: engineering talent, manufacturing, etc. As Elon has said people are generally terrible at exponentials, and so majority of people can't see or understand the economies of scale and synergy between everything he's doing - and the compounding effect that has on reducing costs and increasing speed of scaling - which then also compound with each other.
pyinstallwoes 5y ago
Oh okay, thanks for your insights. Tell me, do you work on these problems and with a team of the top 1% of the field?
N7FAA52318 5y ago
1. Nowhere indicates Elon Musk believes "he can easily repeat that success in other areas." 2. So do you believe you know better (than Musk) about - the relative difficulties of disruption of auto and space industries vs this humanoid industry and - Self-driving to be judgemental? I would hold my tongue and meanwhile, wait and see.

zippy5 5y ago

He replaced his marketing department with a R&D department. It really doesn’t have to work, just keep the believers believing.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rococode 5y ago

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a different story in the press for the sake of fundraising and PR. I think he's really got figured it out tbh - as long as he expects the technology to exist at some point, the fact that he's parked a big chunk of cash in the idea gives him an advantage. It's like he's reserved a spot for his company to exist when the tech exists. His team doesn't necessarily have to be the one actually making breakthrough innovations in order to be in a good position to reap the advantages of said innovations.

CommieBobDole 5y ago
That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that. If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.
- OnlineGladiator 5y ago
  > If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style. I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic. Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
  - pontusrehula 5y ago
    I think industrial robotics is a well established and profitable field.
    - weego 5y ago
      Industrial robotics focuses on single task, highly specialised machines that have few constraints on form, size etc. This is not that. What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
    - squarefoot 5y ago

discodave 5y ago

Or, he likes press releases to distract from other ahem, issues that Tesla has. Like the current court cases about their "self driving" technology. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/tesla-autopilot-self-driving-false-advertising-germany.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/tesla-autopilot-self-driving...

maxdo 5y ago
was my initial thought, from the comments in the video, it's clear they didn't think deep enough about Robot application. So I guess the main goal is to make politicians be busy thinking of universal income instead of BS like "naming of the autopilot". By the time government will decide something in this trials autopilot will be 4-5 generation different software they trying to evaluate. Aren't that first signs of singularity?

imron 5y ago

> I don't see this happening in any useful form in the next 5-10 years. The way it will get to a useful form after 5-10 years is projects like this.

itsoktocry 5y ago
Projects like what? They have nothing but a person in a leotard and a silly slide deck. Meanwhile other companies have been actively working on the problem for years.

x-shadowban 5y ago

I would like to see him run a hospital and maybe put a dent into the problem of the $200 aspirin.

mzkply 5y ago
talk to congress. it's a policy problem.
simondotau 5y ago
The underlying cause of the problem of the "$200 asprin" isn't a fundamental problem of healthcare, it's a fundamental problem of the wacky health system of the USA which is—I assure you—the envy of no other first world country. While it is true that the US health system excels along certain narrow metrics (it's particularly well optimised for providing cutting edge care to the affluent) it is poorly optimised for serving the needs of the median citizen. And it's a dumpster fire when it comes to distribution and affordability. The solution exists, and that's to stop doing the broken thing.
tigershark 5y ago
How on Earth you guys pay so much? Aspirin is 1£ for 16 caplets or less in every supermarket.
- josefx 5y ago
  Inflated Hospital bills that are usually dealt with by an insurance, so most people never see that $200 line.

lazysheepherd 5y ago

Have you even watched the announcement? Has anyone commenting here did? He clearly said the bot v1 won't do more than carrying simple things and will be super slow and weak. It will only have very basic grasping hands, even likely with 3 fingers. It will be what grasshopper was to Falcon 9. And about autonomous driving, Tesla autopilot seems to be almost as good as Waymo, except with pure vision. And I'd bet a great sum Tesla will move faster forward.

fragmede 5y ago
which, anyone naysaying bot v1 doesn't see it. Think about moving a dishwasher. Up and down stairs, over and across pathways which are just a little too narrow for the furniture dolly so it keeps riding into the dirt. The target market for v1 is going to be slim, because I bet it won't be cheap. But it will be endlessly useful, and doesn't need to solve really hard general AI grade robotics problems, just some computer vision things, and without the self-driving car crashing penalty. The question is: how much? Price it too high and the market just isn't there. Furniture dolly's don't have the same cachet as sports cars. I'm hopeful, because the technology is so close.
- qaq 5y ago
  Just based on novelty factor and number of millionaires in the world if it's 50-80K they prob can sell more than they can make
perryizgr8 5y ago
> Tesla autopilot seems to be almost as good as Waymo Tesla's system is better, if only because you can buy it right now. Waymo has sold exactly zero of their cars, and they don't even have a plan to do that any time soon.
- shawabawa3 5y ago
  Waymo isn't a car manufacturer so of course they haven't sold cars They're selling rides in phoenix though

justicezyx 5y ago

No no-no This type of reasoning simply does not understand the market competition. Once there is a market, the goal is to win the competition, not to hit some technical bar. Is there a better player in the industry in building humanoid robot? I rarely see any that is better than Tesla. Modern cars are essentially a robot, or the closest thing in tech stack. Is Musk stretching himself? Of cuz, that's how new things are created...

imron 5y ago
> Is there a better player in the industry in building humanoid robot? Boston Dynamics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk
FireBeyond 5y ago
Boston Dynamics? They've been working on such things for years and they're still very much in their infancy.
- mlajtos 5y ago
  AFAIK they were avoiding deep learning like the plague for the locomotion. I don't know if something has changed, but that's why the progress was slow.
  - spiderfarmer 5y ago
    Which is interesting given recent developments in AI motor control: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/08/1022176/boston-dynamics-cassie-robot-walk-reinforcement-learning-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/08/1022176/boston-d...
mhh__ 5y ago
What does better mean? I assume not the fit and finish of these "robots"

blueblisters 5y ago

Counter-argument: I remember seeing a talk by Andrej from a year or two ago and wasn't too impressed - it seemed like they had a huge amount of work left to do and put everything together for a reliable self-driving AI. Everything they showed today, from the vision models to the path planning to labeling to simulation was bleeding edge. And they seem to have managed to put everything together in what appears to be a tremendous engineering effort. I can't see why they can't use a similar playbook for the humanoid robot and increase value over time. The vision framework they used for self-driving is fairly general and can probably adapted to humanoids. The action policy space is less re-usable but I suspect they have clever ideas on how to tackle that. Musk may be bad at forecasting but he's darn good at selling stuff that half-works and then assembling a team that can execute on his vision.

itsoktocry 5y ago
If it's bleeding edge, why does it underperform the competition?
- blueblisters 5y ago
  I'm speaking from my knowledge of the specific technologies they are using - it's fairly close to SOTA. I'm not aware of an apples-to-apples comparison of Tesla's autopilot with a similar system from the competition. Most competitors are using LIDARs and/or running their autonomous vehicles in limited geographical regions. IMO, the state space and action space is significantly more constrained in those cases.
  - FartyMcFarter 5y ago
    Having the ability to use LIDAR and not just cameras is less constrained, not more.

FireBeyond 5y ago

Right. I mean how many years has Boston Dynamics been cranking at 'teaching' a robot how to walk like a human, and it's still a work in progress? But of course Musk is going to bust it out in the next 16 months at most. Just like FSD, "this year", "this year really", "this time we promise we mean this year", "this year, seriously folks".

dougmwne 5y ago
Boston Dynamics has made some pretty incredible progress. The very first videos had Atlas and Spot "walking" but really more like controlled tripping. It was cool and impressive, but definitely in line with my idea of what was possible in robotics. The most recent video has Atlas doing parkour. It's skin crawling. It looks fake. It can jump and flip better than I ever could. It is suddenly out of step with what I ever thought a robot would do. Conventionally, I would agree that this sounds like an insane overreach from Musk, but it feels like the ground is shifting under my feet and the previously preposterous is becoming suddenly possibly with increasing frequency. Anyway, better that it gets me my groceries than hunts me down through the forest.
- moogly 5y ago
  > The very first videos had Atlas and Spot "walking" but really more like controlled tripping To be fair, human walking is often described as "controlled falling".

csmeder 5y ago

Haha, and then in 10 years when He announces X you will say: “since he’s had great success in pioneering self landing reusable rockets, starting a colony on Mars, pioneering the EV market, pioneering Robo taxis, making the first commercial humanoid robots, moving traffic underground, adding computers to people’s brains, he has now fallen for the idea that he can easily repeat that success in other areas like X” This is going to be a good thread to come back to in 10 years. Maybe I’ll be completely wrong and need to admit I was foolishly optimistic in Musk’s ability, however, my guess is the parent comment will be hilarious/absurd in hindsight.

TigeriusKirk 5y ago
I'm bookmarking this comment in my browser. Given how rarely I clean my bookmarks, I'm sure I'll still have it in 10 years to visit. Naming the bookmark "Open 8/19/2031"
- csmeder 5y ago
  See you in 2031!
bserge 5y ago
Yeah, yeah, but aside from all that, what has Musk done for us?
- libertine 5y ago
  He provides entertainment for "nerds" like us, to the point of creating feud and division. And he knows it. Just to be clear it's nerds from tech, finance, auto, etc.
- moogly 5y ago
  He's making us all look on the bright side of life?
- pyinstallwoes 5y ago
  I don't know, maybe Space industry, rockets, and AI?

sergiotapia 5y ago

We said the same thing about movement in robots -- and today we have: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4DML7FIWk Just ridiculous how far things have come, it seems fake it's so far along.

derefr 5y ago

> Self-driving is one of those things that's relatively easy to get 95% of the way to, but that last 5% is nearly impossible. But there are niches for which 95% is just fine. E.g. autonomous trucks driving through the Nevada desert with manual remote-control during the first and last mile. (Like handover from plane autopilot to ATC-driven landing, basically.) > in any useful form It doesn't have to be useful; it just has to be better than whatever Toyota is selling, to win long-term robotics development contracts. (That probably won't be contracts for humanoid robots, mind you. The humanoid robot is likely a halo product to sell e.g. robot arms.)

Ekaros 5y ago

And then you look at some other things he has part-taken in, like Boring company and ask question how is this in anyway better than what we already have, by any metric... And I won't even go to Hyperloop, which he had sense not to spend money on...

gerash 5y ago

Tesla FSD might end up getting good enough after a hardware upgrade in 5 years or so. The humanoid seems at least a decade or two away. That said, I truly enjoy that he's investing time and money in these futuristic sci-fi projects rather than trying to optimize the next quarter earnings.

mempko 5y ago
Most projects of his use government funds. I wonder if this will too.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  The US government has something approaching a 100x return on R&D investment in the US economy…
  - mempko 5y ago
    Exactly. We socialize the costs but unfortunately privatize the profits. Americans should get stock.

senectus1 5y ago

If he surrounds himself with the right people and sticks to his spacex production rules: Step 1 Make it less dumb Step 2 Delete a part of the process - If you're not adding step in 10% of the time, you're not deleting enough Step 3 Simplify or Optimize Step 4 Go Faster Step 5 Automate He may very well excel yet again...

ButtSpark69 5y ago

would you rather he not try?

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Energy storage is one of the most problematic aspects. These guys will need to be heavy to be useful for more than a couple of minutes. This creates additional challenges (like quickly moving toddlers). I bet early adopters will be people without small kids.

rmst 5y ago

It doesn't matter if this isn't happening in any useful form in a reasonable amount of time. It's still great for hiring and funding. He has used the same hiring technique since x.com: 1) announce overambitious, relatable, unoriginal goal (e.g. human settlement on Mars) 2) present vague, relatable, unoriginal strategy (e.g. reusable rockets) 3) hire people 4) actually have them work on more incremental stuff (e.g. launch provider services) 5) profit

libertine 5y ago
My opinion on Musk changed with the whole crypto pump & dump thing, for the worst ofc, but those public announcements with ambitious goals are key for his achievements and to get the right people to work on those problems. There's a lot of people here that apparently don't like that him for saying things lightly, and to pose complex problems as trivial problems - but isn't that the driver to break those barriers and challenge that type of barriers such people create. "Oh no, this is a whole different problem he shouldn't dare to say this!" Except he should, and if he gets the right people involved with the right motivations and funding they might actually do something. How can they fail? Even if it take them 10 years to do so. People shouldn't underestimate the power of those bold statements, for example Musk said in a recent interview that Tesla probably has the best material eng. team in the world - and the thing is that they might not be the best, or the smartest, but they sure as hell are contributing to the leap of Tesla over everyone else. Will people drop from Boston Dynamics to go work for Tesla? Why not, if some don't agree with the status quo, or because they think that things should be done differently and BD isn't willing to pursue that because they're too invested into their own thing. So this should be celebrated, more people working to solve this is the right path.
elurg 5y ago
Launch services are in fact the most important problem to work on for a human settlement on Mars and SpaceX is making useful progress towards it. SpaceX is following their vision very precisely.

jondiggsit 5y ago

It’s an ad for talent… get it now?

machiaweliczny 5y ago

For me it seems Musk has ability to hire competent people because he can verify if you are bullshitting him down to physics. This and being bold and rich and persistent is enough for success it seems. Ah, also marketing/vision to get (more) money.

inglor_cz 5y ago

The border between "improving existing technologies with innovative engineering" and "technological breakthroughs" is pretty murky, though. For example, Raptor engines are the first Full Flow Staged Combustion engines to ever fly and they should be cheap to manufacture on top of that. Orders of magnitude cheaper than other rocket engines, with target price tag lower than a million USD per piece. By my standards, this is a breakthrough. By your standards, this may just be innovative engineering. We can both argue our positions plausibly. I can definitely see applications of having at least semireliable robots on Mars or Moon, though. For starters, they need not mind the vacuum and the radiation.

danf1 5y ago

I was skeptical when I saw it, even as a long time fan. But I thought is using all money capital, _human_ capital and trying really hard to "repeat that success in other areas" such a bad thing? It doesn't seem so, but the despair in comments like these sound very smart, i'll give you that.

loceng 5y ago

Your conclusion made me chuckle: 5-10 years isn't very long to get to a mass produced general purpose robot that's useful; and as Elon said they already make all of the components necessary - including aggressively working on AI including for visual systems - so they arguably only have refinement left and edge cases to figure out next - not a small feat but puts them 10+ years ahead of anyone who will try to copy them re: engineering talent, manufacturing, etc. As Elon has said people are generally terrible at exponentials, and so majority of people can't see or understand the economies of scale and synergy between everything he's doing - and the compounding effect that has on reducing costs and increasing speed of scaling - which then also compound with each other.

pyinstallwoes 5y ago

Oh okay, thanks for your insights. Tell me, do you work on these problems and with a team of the top 1% of the field?

N7FAA52318 5y ago

1. Nowhere indicates Elon Musk believes "he can easily repeat that success in other areas." 2. So do you believe you know better (than Musk) about - the relative difficulties of disruption of auto and space industries vs this humanoid industry and - Self-driving to be judgemental? I would hold my tongue and meanwhile, wait and see.