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The Optimus robots at Tesla's Cybercab event were humans in disguise
- penjelly 2y agonot impressed by slow, teleoperated movements and scripted dance routines. Best they showed off was walking, and that was slow and engineers guarded the bots closely to ensure nothing went wrong.
- allears 2y agoThat still seems pretty remarkable to me that they're able to do such complex things via remote control (wireless, with multiple robots in the room). I'd love to see what sort of setup the operators were using, and how much the robot did on its own.
- stathibus 2y agoThis could have been the story that cast them in a positive light, if they were honest about it. They were beyond dishonest. Operators at the event were instructed not to give a clear answer when attendees asked if the robots were autonomous or not. It's like going to disney world and asking "are you the real mickey mouse" except the investors actually need to know if its mickey mouse (spoiler: it wasn't)
- sschueller 2y agoThey had things like this in the 80s before VFX became the norm when making movies. Although not wireless back then the puppeteering rigs were very fluid and sophisticated. Nowadays we have teleoperated robots for surgery. There is a video online of a person folding origami with one of those and the dexterity is incredible. Edit: https://youtu.be/MOSTAvsQpdM https://youtu.be/MOSTAvsQpdM
- chrisco255 2y agoWe have teleoperated robotic arms for surgery. We do not have practical humanoid robots and have never had practical, productized teleoperated humanoid robots.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- GenerocUsername 2y agoI wonder if the humans, in whatever control rig they had, have to act 'robotic', or if the rig is just some sort of pose interpolator which naturally adds the robotic characteristics by way of literally being a robot
- sschueller 2y agoSince they didn't disclose this, wouldn't it then be fraud? Does anyone remember when Nikola rolled their truck down a hill to make it appear to be driving? The CEO went to prison...
- fastball 2y agoTesla would've needed to claim that they were not being remotely operated, which AFAIK they did not do.
- immibis 2y agoThat was him, this is Elon.
- guywithahat 2y agoTo my understanding, there was a human remote assisting the robot in some demos. So some of the demos were just the AI, others like the bartender was a robot being controlled by a human. Honestly it doesn’t seem that bad to me, when I read the headline I thought it was going to be people in costumes
- greenthrow 2y agoRead the article. Only the walking was AI. Everything else was human controlled, ie faked.
- skeledrew 2y agoWhat's wrong with that? Were any explicit claims made that the bots were fully controlled by AI?
- victor106 2y agoI don’t think Elon would ever go to prison. He’s too powerful. He is Trump’s best buddy now. So he is fine.
- threeseed 2y ago
- jncfhnb 2y agoRemotely controlled humanoid robots are pretty cool though, aren’t they? Like, potentially hugely valuable?
- dom96 2y agoYeah, they were cool in the 2000s too when ASIMO was shown off. What ever happened to that? Honda is now valued higher than Tesla, right? Oh wait... no they are not.
- chrisco255 2y agoASIMO never made it off stage, and Honda never prioritized shipping it. We definitely never saw ASIMO milling around a crowded event and serving drinks and handing out gift bags. It was never remote controllable by unskilled operators. It doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to come up with scenarios where even a remote controlled bot would be incredibly useful to society. If Honda never productized it or developed Asimo into something practical, then we can only speculate the reasons why. But that's on Honda for failing to follow through, ultimately.
- mossTechnician 2y agoGenerally, humanoid robots are not preferable to other, purpose-built robots that (for example) you'll see on factory floors. Boston Dynamics already have adaptable, quadrupedal robots that can be remotely deployed too. The tasks Tesla suggested included babysitting, and now that we know that the robots are built for remote control first, I would feel pretty uncomfortable with letting my child alone in the same house with a robot like that. Vacuum cleaners are bad enough. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ecovacs-robot-vacuums-hacked-slurs/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/ecovacs-robot-vacuums-hacked...
- schiffern 2y ago>remote control first If you mean 'first' in a literal chronological sense, sure. It's a logical R&D stepping stone. If you mean it's the typical operating mode for the final product, I doubt we can conclude that just from an early public tech demo.
- mvdtnz 2y agoNot humans in disguise, but remotely controlled.
- dcmatt 2y agoStill amazing progress! Such a shame that Sony and Honda gave up on their bipedal robots 20 years ago. Imagine where we could've been
- threeseed 2y agoThey gave up because those types of robots are mostly pointless. You're better off with job specific designs like what Boston Dynamics does.
- chrisco255 2y agoNone of those bots ever made it out of the lab or controlled stage presences. They were never pointless. They gave up for the same reason many people gave up on AI multiple times over the last 70 years. The compute wasn't there and the techniques were too manual. They were literally the meme of the miner giving up just before he strikes a diamond. Honda retired Asimo in 2017, the same year Google published "Attention Is All You Need".
- threeseed 2y agoRobots are everywhere from vacuum cleaners to manufacturing. The fact that companies haven't been rushing to produce humanoid versions should tell you everything about their usefulness.
- chrisco255 2y agoIt tells you about the difficulty of creating humanoid robots. Humans are extremely dexterous and agile creatures and it is an extremely challenging engineering task to produce humanoid robots.
- timeon 2y ago> Imagine where we could've been Where?
- gnabgib 2y agoDiscussion on the source article (79 points, 2 days ago, 82 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
- sktrdie 2y agoMy biggest beef with this is: why humanly shaped? Our shape is the outcome of evolutionary survival in an environment that is very much different from... a household?
- mhh__ 2y agoBut we then made houses
- griffzhowl 2y agoThis is a good point - households, and their implements and staircases and so on, have evolved to fit our shapes
- gojomo 2y agoWhy humanly shaped, you ask? Drop-in compatibility with all human-shaped legacy interfaces, for the most-rapid deprecation of homo sapiens as soon as the ASI can teleoperate humanoid proxies.
- wongarsu 2y agoBecause robots shaped for their environment are old news, to the point that most of them aren't even called robots. If you want to wow people and have them feel a connection to your robot you have to make it at least resemble a mammal. Even better if it resembles a human. There's also the other argument about humanoid robots doing better in environments adapted to humans. But that's so far that hasn't really panned out.
- pvaldes 2y agoNot even a mammal. Even having the articulations in the wrong place (as the Boston dynamics dog) creates a lot of discomfort in the potential customers
- golol 2y agoTake Optimus, teleoperate it to be a Bartender, collect the training data for your actual robotender. Repeat for any reasonably specific task.
- loteck 2y ago100% false headline. Where's the integrity, Verge?
- wongarsu 2y agoI haven't seen the event, so I don't know how Musk presented them, and whether he was misleading or just vague in describing them. But imho the headline goes to far in calling them "humans in disguise". The headline makes it sound like they were literal humans in robot costumes like those in the Chinese World Robot Conference last month. I guess we can haggle over the definition of "robot". But they are humanoid machines that happen to be mostly remote-controlled - with some automation for functions like walking. If these aren't robots then neither are Boston Dynamic's dogs, and I have never seen anyone complain about people describing them as robots
- mvdtnz 2y ago> The headline makes it sound like they were literal humans in robot costumes like those in the Chinese World Robot Conference last month. Another example of this behaviour is Tesla themselves 3 years ago. https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-mocked-after-unveiling-a-robot-that-was-a-human-in-a-lycra-suit/ https://www.drive.com.au/news/tesla-mocked-after-unveiling-a...
- schiffern 2y agoThe suited dancer was just an 'ice breaker' joke to start off, and obviously so. It was presented as such. Did anyone seriously think it was being put forward as a real robot??
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- slimebot80 2y ago"I guess we can haggle over the definition of robot" You could also actually watch the event and listen to how Elon exaggerates his own definition of what was presented.
- valval 2y agoI watched the event and didn’t get any of this. Could you quote directly?
- jmartin2683 2y agoThe new disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast was doing some heavy lifting throughout the entire presentation.
- underwater 2y agoThe thing that takes this into scam territory for me is Elon’s comments that “we started with a person in a robot suit and improved dramatically year after year, so if you extrapolate this we’re going to have something extraordinary.” This statement is deliberately worded to avoid making a promise because Elon knows it is effectively a big fat lie. To date Tesla have solved the same problems that others have already solved. You can’t extrapolate progress because what comes next are the really hard problems that no one has solved. Even if Tesla is able solve those problems, there is zero chance that they can move at the same speed. They have 50% of an autonomous robot, but the next half is going to take 90% of the effort. This is the usual smoke and mirrors. Elon shows off a tech demo using incremental gains and falsely represents how long it will take them to deliver on a revolutionary product.
- fastball 2y agoElon's companies actually have a track record of solving the hard problems that take 90% of the effort, so that doesn't seem like a lie at all.
- api 2y agoSpaceX does, as we saw today. I suspect it’s in part because your employment options in aerospace are very limited and SpaceX is one of the best if you want to advance your career or work on cool stuff in space. I also get the sense it’s the one Elon cares most about and the one with the strongest sense of internal mission. His other companies less so. Tesla was early in EVs and did a lot of things right but the FSD push has been a huge disappointment and stuff like Cybertruck is a joke. Meanwhile other car companies are catching up. Boring company is boring. Maybe Neuralink?
- chrisco255 2y agoNo other car manufacturer has anything close to FSD. Tesla is 1000 miles ahead of their closest competitor on that point. Waymo isn't scalable or practical for the future. No one wants a giant ugly lidar attached to every corner of their vehicle. The CyberTruck is the highest selling electric truck, so it's not a joke by any means. Would you listen to yourself nitpicking at whether or not someone's 8th or 9th company is as impressive as their 3rd or 4th. Who has that kind of record, either present day or any time in history? Edison is about the only name that comes close.
- jampa 2y agoIt’s very clear that the talent that made Tesla great and gave the company the headstart is clearly gone. One thing that the stock market investors don’t realize yet is that CEOs are not the most important part of the company. The same “Shit of Theseus” phenomenon happens with companies like Blizzard which talent remains only in name and brand recognition, peharps would not be best to move on from expecting things from a brand name that constantly misses the mark.
- caboteria 2y agoI'm not sure that you meant to say "Shit of Theseus" but if you did: bravo!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- transfire 2y agoWell, duh. I don’t think it really matters. The plan is to train the robots via telepresence. If that works out, no one will care that these demos used exactly that.
- GaggiX 2y agoWe will have these robots in 2 years /s
- siliconc0w 2y agoIMO the tesla event could've used more emphasis on how they're going to use low latency tele-operations ("via Starlink") to bridge the gap between where they're at and full autonomy. That is at least a more convincing story for investors than yet another promise the current tech will be ready by 2027.
- chrisco255 2y agoThis event's focal point was the Cybercab and the Robovan. Optimus being live in front of an audience was a bonus.
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
- dom96 2y agoThe thing that I don't get about the silly Tesla robots is that we literally had the same in the 2000s. It was funnily enough also made by a car manufacturer. It was the Honda ASIMO. Optimus is at best a slightly better ASIMO. What makes it better enough to make it exciting when ASIMO stalled?
- skeledrew 2y agoStrange wording of the title, but no real surprise here. This wasn't meant to showcase AI in humanoid robots, but how far along humanoids have come in terms of physical dexterity, IMO. What we'll see going forward will be similar to the vehicle fleet: the humanoid fleet will be manned by real humans, learning from them for years and gradually taking over various tasks as they become rote. Human controllers will over time be able to handle increasingly more bots simultaneously, until relegated to a purely supervisory role. Just as with the latest Tesla vehicle update the driver doesn't even need to keep their hand on the wheel anymore, but merely watch the road, and robotaxis with neither steering wheel nor pedals are now feasible.
- tennisflyi 2y agoNot surprising. At all. People, supposedly “smart,” eat it the fuck up.
- blastonico 2y agoHow long it will take until journalists call the starship booster catch a fraud?
- jfoster 2y agoThey all spoke with different voices. It was obvious to most people that they probably were remotely operated. There's several videos (in the article, even!) of people at the event asking them if they are being operated by a human. They said that they are. The Verge is trying to manufacture controversy.
- josefritzishere 2y agoElon is escalating quickly into a scam artist. I just don't trust any of his pronouncements or products anymore.