Boston dynamics has found machine learning to be minimally useful here, and has had better results hand-coding most things. That’s not to say that is necessaril

Boston dynamics has found machine learning to be minimally useful here, and has had better results hand-coding most things. That’s not to say that is necessarily correct for all scenarios, but BD has lots of extremely smart and motivated people and I would take their results seriously - so at very least it doesn’t seem to be as easy as throwing a big neural net at it, and any machine learning approach will require hard and careful work. Re: successfully demonstrated, again Boston Dynamics might be the best example. Their bipeds are nowhere near the functionality levels Elon is describing - fine motor skills, vision, even walking (it’s my understanding that Boston Dynamics has to individually tune their bipeds for every course) are years and years away from hitting Elon’s goals at current rate of progress. Furthermore, the BD bipeds have a battery life of about ten minutes. You need a revolution in either energy storage density or kinematic efficiency or more likely both to get a useful assistant bot out of it.