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Comment by briandw | Hacker News Reader

They didn't say otherwise, they showed robots walking around and doing things, but never said anything about not having people controlling them. It was clear that there was a person that was talking on the other end if you listen to the video. Honestly having 20 tele-operated robots walking around in a crowd is pretty impressive. I haven't seen anything like that before.

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Have you been to a modern airport lately? A distribution center (warehouse)? Autonomous robots move around in crowded places all the time. Not humanoid robots, because that’s a bad and unnecessary form factor. Disneyland had tele-operated “robots” decades ago. Stop huffing the Kool Aid. You need to evaluate the event based on what Musk promised, not on what you think looks hard or cool.

> They didn't say otherwise

It was literally their "Autonomy Event". Right there in the title.

Yeah sure, that's the promise in the future, it's a demo of an unreleased product. It's all about someday when they are done. It was pretty clear from the talk at the beginning that Optimus is years out from being for sale to consumers.

Then what's the point of the event if you can't even show a prototype?

A big announcement of "a promise in the future"? Like hyperloop or "rockets flying from New York to Tokyo and to Mars in 2024"? Or the 2017 Roadster?

This is some mental gymnastics.

> it's a demo of an unreleased product.

I dunno, if it's not actually an autonomous robot, I'd say it's more a non-demo of a fantasy product.

> It was pretty clear from the talk at the beginning that Optimus is years out from being for sale to consumers.

So he's walking back this, then:

"Tesla could start selling Optimus robots by the end of [2025], Musk says"

"Musk told investors on a conference call that he guessed the Tesla robot, called Optimus, would be able to perform tasks in the factory by the end of [2024]."

Let's not even talk about how it would be "financially irresponsible" to not own a Tesla by 2019 because it will be making you "$30,000 a year in your sleep".

>it's a demo of an unreleased product.

Sounds like what Trevor Milton got sent away for

> Honestly having 20 tele-operated robots…

I think it’s interesting because it reveals their development strategy: • Build a hardware kit that can well avatar human motion from motion capture suits. This gives hardware a validation model to guide development. • Then use the motion capture datasets to train the neural net which will auto operate the kit.

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