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It is interesting that many of the top comments are as dismissive as: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame,” When you look at Tesla’s talent in: AI + mo

It is interesting that many of the top comments are as dismissive as: “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame,” When you look at Tesla’s talent in: AI + motors + batteries + manufacturing I can’t believe how negative and dismissive the comments are. Can we not have some appreciation for what Tesla HAS achieved vs only focusing on missed ship dates? The part that I think is going over peoples head is that for so many jobs a robot can be as error prone as FSD is currently today and still be safe to replace a human. You wouldn’t want the robot to control a fork lift but it could replace many jobs in a factory with out creating major risk. The flaw with full self driving right now is not that it doesn’t work sometimes. Rather it needs to work 99.999999% of the time. This isn’t true for many 5 mile an hour jobs. If they can get the robot to complete a job correctly 99% of the time, at the right price that robot will be printing money for the company that owns it.

throwawayboise 5y ago
If my robot folds my laundry correctly for 99 days and on the 100th day shreds my wardrobe, I don't think that will print money (at least not for very long).
- csmeder 5y ago
  From what I’ve seen FSD makes minor mistakes that at high speeds lead to danger or death. I can’t see a minor mistake in folding laundry leading to the laundry being shredded. Musk said the robots would not be strong (only can lift 5lbs). So unless the robot picked up scissors it couldn’t shred the laundry. Unless I’m missing something?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - natch 5y ago
    FSD has not been rolled out yet, so you’re attributing to FSD some errors that are actually made by humans. Yeah maybe these humans were confused by marketing to think it was FSD, just as you think it was FSD, but that doesn’t make it FSD.
    - natch 5y ago
      The downvotes are fascinating. It’s like doubling down on misinformed thinking but… to what end?
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      Tesla is quite literally selling a package called "Full Self-Driving". I don't see how it has not been "rolled out yet" unless you're confusing Tesla's bullshit marketing lingo for level 5 autonomous driving.
      - natch 5y ago
        It’s described as a future feature that you can prepay for though.
        Hamuko 5y ago
        What, in the fine print after the giant "FULL-SELF DRIVING CAPABILITY" banners?
- grecy 5y ago
  Sure, that would be bad. So it only needs to be good enough to fold correctly for 99 days, and then on the 100th day just do nothing (i.e., detect a problem and hard STOP). Then a hard reboot will kick it back into line and we're good to go again. Obviously that's not good enough for driving a car, but it certainly is in all the manual labor jobs I've ever had.
- simondotau 5y ago
  A robot that folds laundry would obviously have torque limits while handling clothing, so the prospect of destruction would be minimal. The error domain of a laundry robot would be misidentifying an unusual item and incorrectly folding it, or incorrectly sorting it. If someone sold a humanoid laundry robot which folded and sorted my clothes correctly 99% of the time, I'd consider that miraculous.
spenczar5 5y ago
Can you describe the manual labor field where 1% failure rate is acceptable? I am struggling to think of one. I suppose it depends on the magnitude of the failure.
- grecy 5y ago
  I worked in a factory that was the distribution centre for all the cold and frozen food in every Safeway in the sate. There were a few hundred of us who had to pickup a heavy box from a conveyor belt, turn around, take a step or two and put the heavy box down on a pallet. When the pallet was full someone would come and take it away. Repeat. For 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Upstairs people were manually putting those boxes on the belts. It destroyed people's bodies, I'm happy I only worked there for a few months each year to put myself through University. The factory was very high tech and cutting edge, though the humans at each end of the conveyor belts were unavoidable. We messed up all the time - dropped boxes, did bad stacking and made pallets fall over, crashed pallet jacks and knocked over pallets etc. The failure rate was probably around 5%, I'd guess. Starting pay was around $30/hr, double that on Sundays, and 2.5 on Public Holidays A humanoid robot that actually works most of the time will change the world.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    This doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would require a humanoid robot to solve though? It's just that even with current state of the art robotics, things like grabbing cardboard boxes (easily crumpled or dropped, mass distribution within may be uneven or unstable, may already be broken or leaking etc) and stacking them into a stable 3D pallet is actually quite hard, so much so that Boston Dynamics managing to do some parts of this in optimal conditions with uniform, lightweight boxes was hailed as a breakthrough: https://youtu.be/uuO6oeO0-ts https://youtu.be/uuO6oeO0-ts
- csmeder 5y ago
  Every manual job I’ve ever done I’ve probably failed more than 1% of every movement. But then I correct. In a car moving at high speeds (focus matters more), I do this less often, but I have been in crashes.
mortenjorck 5y ago
This isn’t “no wireless, less space than a Nomad,” though. This is like RCA announcing an iPod in 1961, reasoning that because they already make magnetic tape and portable electronics, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be able to fit 1000 songs in your pocket.
- csmeder 5y ago
  Fair point, however, I look forward to coming back to this comment in 5 years (1966). Maybe I’ll be eating humble pie, however, my guess is that by then it will be out of prototype phase and in use.
  - d13 5y ago
    In 40 years, 2001
  - llsf 5y ago
    This is a good point that most of us have difficulty to grasp. The innovation speed is actually increasing. While Tesla is spending a lot of time and effort on their AI (from hardware to software), they might be able to reuse it later for other things, automating more tasks, and at scale. There is a compounding effect. I don't think Tesla is kidding itself with Optimus, the v1 would be close to useless, and they know it. But it would allow them to learn, build a team of experts and get to the state of the art, to eventually improve it and go beyond. Maybe the main added value at the time would on the software only i.e. mechanically the robot would not be much better than the Boston Robotics of the day. And it could sufficient to actually make a big difference between a Boston Robotics and Tesla Bot ? I am curious to see what they will end up with. I am not worry about the timeline. I was not expecting a humanoid robot in the next 10years. Tonight announcement is not really changing it, except that now, Musk put a stick on the ground, and we might witness some actual progress.
CommieBobDole 5y ago
I don't dismiss Tesla's successes at all, but they are primarily repackaging and improving technologies that already exist. They didn't need to invent the lithium-ion battery, or the electric motor, or the automobile; all of those things already existed and were available to be adapted to Tesla's desired use. Humanoid robots, however, are a much harder problem than building a mass-market-ready electric car. In order for someone to bring to market a robot that can perform general household tasks, for instance picking up dirty laundry around the house, putting it the washing machine and dryer, then folding or hanging it up, then they first need to make multiple fundamental several-order-of-magnitude breakthroughs in the fields of machine vision, robotic locomotion, energy storage, artificial general intelligence, etc. I'm not dismissive because I don't think Tesla is full of brilliant people who can do amazing things. I'm dismissive because building a useful, mass-market humanoid robot would be an achievement of incredible magnitude that's as far outside of the current envelope of technological achievement as the moon landing would have been to the Wright brothers.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  You've left out manufacturing. Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge. Tesla had the best and the brightest - I've worked with them before they were acquired by Tesla on a daily basis: https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/ https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/ and still had trouble scaling. Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars - electric or not. Edit: What's with the downvotes? Disagree? Comment below then.
  - Joeri 5y ago
    According to musk manufacturing is the hardest part of rocketry as well.
    - sterlind 5y ago
      that makes sense. rockets are big dumb objects with incredibly tight engineering tolerances. humanoid robots are anything but big and dumb, and there's no incremental path to success between a bunch of servos wired to a mannequin and having it do the dishes.
sagondis 5y ago
Tesla is not without problems. Poor drive quality. After spending 40K+ for the car, I was cited for not having front number plate. I had to figure out how to tape the frame, spend more time appearing in court. I prefer not doing such things than having automatic s/w update for fine tuning fart noise.
- modeless 5y ago
  You're blaming Tesla because you didn't use the front license plate holder that they give you, ready to go?
  - sagondis 5y ago
    why did they put it in the trunk when all other car dealers fix it and give ? And why do you see 80% of Tesla'a on the road without the front number plates ? Also if you put the number plate it may not reach their advertised 0-100 mile in 3.x seconds ?
    - modeless 5y ago
      Because a lot of people like to leave it off, especially on expensive cars, not exclusive to Tesla. It looks better and the chances of getting a ticket are actually pretty low. There are plenty of people who've driven around without a front plate for many years without getting cited, and it usually just a fix-it ticket without a big penalty. It's not generally because people are ignorant of the law. And it's not required everywhere either.
    - rlt 5y ago
      I’m happy they left it up to the customer to put the front plate on. It makes the car look worse and I’ll accept the risk of a citation.
ragebol 5y ago
Im 100% sure Tesla can mass-produce the hardware for such robots. But the biggest challenge is in software, And then the FSD debacle comes to mind. There's major advances in AI needed to get to full self driving and even more advances for a useful autonomous humanoid robot. But then again, those will not come to fruition just by waiting, someone has to work on this and if Tesla advances the state of the art, I can only welcome them. But I don't expect a Tesla bot in the way Elon poses here in the foreseeable future.
- jollybean 5y ago
  The hardware for such things doesn't exist yet, we don't know how to make it. Have you seen Boston Dynmamics robots? And their clunky size and shape? And compared those to the life-like body of the Tesla demo? We don't know how to make such robots yet.
  - ragebol 5y ago
    Oh, I'm 100% sure the robot hardware Tesla will make will not look like what is shown in the presentation, because that design makes no sense. There's no room for joints to move etc. The BD hardware looks cluncky, but it is robust.
jfoster 5y ago
I am blown away by how many people repeatedly under-estimate Musk's companies despite him eventually proving them wrong basically every time.
- pushingice 5y ago
  True. That's why the cross-country autonomous drive that didn't happen in 2017 is imminent.
  - crubier 5y ago
    Exactly. People were saying it was impossible. He announced it to happen in 2018. It will happen 3-4 years later than planned. And people use that to bash him, forgetting the elephant in the room which is that he made the supposedly impossible possible.
    - lossolo 5y ago
      OP was sarcastic.
      - crubier 5y ago
        I know. I wasn’t clear enough I guess. I should have said « You said exactly the kind of ridiculous argument that haters repeat ». My answer was also sarcastic.
IncRnd 5y ago
> The flaw with full self driving right now is not that it doesn’t work sometimes. .. doesn't work many times.

throwawayboise 5y ago

If my robot folds my laundry correctly for 99 days and on the 100th day shreds my wardrobe, I don't think that will print money (at least not for very long).

csmeder 5y ago
From what I’ve seen FSD makes minor mistakes that at high speeds lead to danger or death. I can’t see a minor mistake in folding laundry leading to the laundry being shredded. Musk said the robots would not be strong (only can lift 5lbs). So unless the robot picked up scissors it couldn’t shred the laundry. Unless I’m missing something?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- natch 5y ago
  FSD has not been rolled out yet, so you’re attributing to FSD some errors that are actually made by humans. Yeah maybe these humans were confused by marketing to think it was FSD, just as you think it was FSD, but that doesn’t make it FSD.
  - natch 5y ago
    The downvotes are fascinating. It’s like doubling down on misinformed thinking but… to what end?
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Tesla is quite literally selling a package called "Full Self-Driving". I don't see how it has not been "rolled out yet" unless you're confusing Tesla's bullshit marketing lingo for level 5 autonomous driving.
    - natch 5y ago
      It’s described as a future feature that you can prepay for though.
      - Hamuko 5y ago
        What, in the fine print after the giant "FULL-SELF DRIVING CAPABILITY" banners?
grecy 5y ago
Sure, that would be bad. So it only needs to be good enough to fold correctly for 99 days, and then on the 100th day just do nothing (i.e., detect a problem and hard STOP). Then a hard reboot will kick it back into line and we're good to go again. Obviously that's not good enough for driving a car, but it certainly is in all the manual labor jobs I've ever had.
simondotau 5y ago
A robot that folds laundry would obviously have torque limits while handling clothing, so the prospect of destruction would be minimal. The error domain of a laundry robot would be misidentifying an unusual item and incorrectly folding it, or incorrectly sorting it. If someone sold a humanoid laundry robot which folded and sorted my clothes correctly 99% of the time, I'd consider that miraculous.

spenczar5 5y ago

Can you describe the manual labor field where 1% failure rate is acceptable? I am struggling to think of one. I suppose it depends on the magnitude of the failure.

grecy 5y ago
I worked in a factory that was the distribution centre for all the cold and frozen food in every Safeway in the sate. There were a few hundred of us who had to pickup a heavy box from a conveyor belt, turn around, take a step or two and put the heavy box down on a pallet. When the pallet was full someone would come and take it away. Repeat. For 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week. Upstairs people were manually putting those boxes on the belts. It destroyed people's bodies, I'm happy I only worked there for a few months each year to put myself through University. The factory was very high tech and cutting edge, though the humans at each end of the conveyor belts were unavoidable. We messed up all the time - dropped boxes, did bad stacking and made pallets fall over, crashed pallet jacks and knocked over pallets etc. The failure rate was probably around 5%, I'd guess. Starting pay was around $30/hr, double that on Sundays, and 2.5 on Public Holidays A humanoid robot that actually works most of the time will change the world.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  This doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would require a humanoid robot to solve though? It's just that even with current state of the art robotics, things like grabbing cardboard boxes (easily crumpled or dropped, mass distribution within may be uneven or unstable, may already be broken or leaking etc) and stacking them into a stable 3D pallet is actually quite hard, so much so that Boston Dynamics managing to do some parts of this in optimal conditions with uniform, lightweight boxes was hailed as a breakthrough: https://youtu.be/uuO6oeO0-ts https://youtu.be/uuO6oeO0-ts
csmeder 5y ago
Every manual job I’ve ever done I’ve probably failed more than 1% of every movement. But then I correct. In a car moving at high speeds (focus matters more), I do this less often, but I have been in crashes.

mortenjorck 5y ago

This isn’t “no wireless, less space than a Nomad,” though. This is like RCA announcing an iPod in 1961, reasoning that because they already make magnetic tape and portable electronics, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be able to fit 1000 songs in your pocket.

csmeder 5y ago
Fair point, however, I look forward to coming back to this comment in 5 years (1966). Maybe I’ll be eating humble pie, however, my guess is that by then it will be out of prototype phase and in use.
- d13 5y ago
  In 40 years, 2001
- llsf 5y ago
  This is a good point that most of us have difficulty to grasp. The innovation speed is actually increasing. While Tesla is spending a lot of time and effort on their AI (from hardware to software), they might be able to reuse it later for other things, automating more tasks, and at scale. There is a compounding effect. I don't think Tesla is kidding itself with Optimus, the v1 would be close to useless, and they know it. But it would allow them to learn, build a team of experts and get to the state of the art, to eventually improve it and go beyond. Maybe the main added value at the time would on the software only i.e. mechanically the robot would not be much better than the Boston Robotics of the day. And it could sufficient to actually make a big difference between a Boston Robotics and Tesla Bot ? I am curious to see what they will end up with. I am not worry about the timeline. I was not expecting a humanoid robot in the next 10years. Tonight announcement is not really changing it, except that now, Musk put a stick on the ground, and we might witness some actual progress.

CommieBobDole 5y ago

I don't dismiss Tesla's successes at all, but they are primarily repackaging and improving technologies that already exist. They didn't need to invent the lithium-ion battery, or the electric motor, or the automobile; all of those things already existed and were available to be adapted to Tesla's desired use. Humanoid robots, however, are a much harder problem than building a mass-market-ready electric car. In order for someone to bring to market a robot that can perform general household tasks, for instance picking up dirty laundry around the house, putting it the washing machine and dryer, then folding or hanging it up, then they first need to make multiple fundamental several-order-of-magnitude breakthroughs in the fields of machine vision, robotic locomotion, energy storage, artificial general intelligence, etc. I'm not dismissive because I don't think Tesla is full of brilliant people who can do amazing things. I'm dismissive because building a useful, mass-market humanoid robot would be an achievement of incredible magnitude that's as far outside of the current envelope of technological achievement as the moon landing would have been to the Wright brothers.

systemvoltage 5y ago
You've left out manufacturing. Building a car factory + supply chain is quite the challenge. Tesla had the best and the brightest - I've worked with them before they were acquired by Tesla on a daily basis: https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/ https://teslagrohmannautomation.de/en/ and still had trouble scaling. Manufacturing is considered to be one of the hardest things about building cars - electric or not. Edit: What's with the downvotes? Disagree? Comment below then.
- Joeri 5y ago
  According to musk manufacturing is the hardest part of rocketry as well.
  - sterlind 5y ago
    that makes sense. rockets are big dumb objects with incredibly tight engineering tolerances. humanoid robots are anything but big and dumb, and there's no incremental path to success between a bunch of servos wired to a mannequin and having it do the dishes.

sagondis 5y ago

Tesla is not without problems. Poor drive quality. After spending 40K+ for the car, I was cited for not having front number plate. I had to figure out how to tape the frame, spend more time appearing in court. I prefer not doing such things than having automatic s/w update for fine tuning fart noise.

modeless 5y ago
You're blaming Tesla because you didn't use the front license plate holder that they give you, ready to go?
- sagondis 5y ago
  why did they put it in the trunk when all other car dealers fix it and give ? And why do you see 80% of Tesla'a on the road without the front number plates ? Also if you put the number plate it may not reach their advertised 0-100 mile in 3.x seconds ?
  - modeless 5y ago
    Because a lot of people like to leave it off, especially on expensive cars, not exclusive to Tesla. It looks better and the chances of getting a ticket are actually pretty low. There are plenty of people who've driven around without a front plate for many years without getting cited, and it usually just a fix-it ticket without a big penalty. It's not generally because people are ignorant of the law. And it's not required everywhere either.
  - rlt 5y ago
    I’m happy they left it up to the customer to put the front plate on. It makes the car look worse and I’ll accept the risk of a citation.

ragebol 5y ago

Im 100% sure Tesla can mass-produce the hardware for such robots. But the biggest challenge is in software, And then the FSD debacle comes to mind. There's major advances in AI needed to get to full self driving and even more advances for a useful autonomous humanoid robot. But then again, those will not come to fruition just by waiting, someone has to work on this and if Tesla advances the state of the art, I can only welcome them. But I don't expect a Tesla bot in the way Elon poses here in the foreseeable future.

jollybean 5y ago
The hardware for such things doesn't exist yet, we don't know how to make it. Have you seen Boston Dynmamics robots? And their clunky size and shape? And compared those to the life-like body of the Tesla demo? We don't know how to make such robots yet.
- ragebol 5y ago
  Oh, I'm 100% sure the robot hardware Tesla will make will not look like what is shown in the presentation, because that design makes no sense. There's no room for joints to move etc. The BD hardware looks cluncky, but it is robust.

jfoster 5y ago

I am blown away by how many people repeatedly under-estimate Musk's companies despite him eventually proving them wrong basically every time.

pushingice 5y ago
True. That's why the cross-country autonomous drive that didn't happen in 2017 is imminent.
- crubier 5y ago
  Exactly. People were saying it was impossible. He announced it to happen in 2018. It will happen 3-4 years later than planned. And people use that to bash him, forgetting the elephant in the room which is that he made the supposedly impossible possible.
  - lossolo 5y ago
    OP was sarcastic.
    - crubier 5y ago
      I know. I wasn’t clear enough I guess. I should have said « You said exactly the kind of ridiculous argument that haters repeat ». My answer was also sarcastic.

IncRnd 5y ago

> The flaw with full self driving right now is not that it doesn’t work sometimes. .. doesn't work many times.