Tesla Optimus Bots Were Remotely Operated at Cybercab Event

But the problem is the majority of people buying and hyping TSLA are not working or have close experience with robotics to see what’s real vs human controlled. That’s intentionally deceptive.

> That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.

Yup. Exactly. The term for this is "Telechir":

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-93104-8_...

My kids have been around lots of robots of all kinds. The very first comment they made while watching the event was: "The robots are being remotely operated. There's no way that's autonomous."

Nice looking machines. Far from being practical outside of a highly controlled environment. This does feel like progress though.

They moved so smoothly, I was impressed

Ever the speech was just a guy trying to pretend he was a robot.

I heard the initial walk out was fully automated.

I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?

In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc. So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.

The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.

Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.

The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .

  > how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated? 

How do you even know they were anything? It is fairly easy to mock up a concept vehicle (I mean it is still a lot of work, but nowhere near what it takes to build an actual one). You can build the shell and interior and put it on any chassis you want.

And let's be real, that robovan couldn't survive a pothole. If you watch the video of people walking out it does not look like the clearance is meaningfully different than their shoes. It is also suspicious that it doesn't seem to rise much after all the people get off. I don't have good angles from that video, so just a flag but not enough to conclude without more evidence (but this is exactly what you'd see if they built it like you do a parade float).

For the robots, I thought it was obvious they were teleoperated. Just the way they talked with people was far too natural.

Don't get me wrong, Tesla and SpaceX have done some great things. But how many times can you c̶r̶y̶ ̶w̶o̶l̶f̶ promise self-driving vehicles next year before people stop trusting you all together? I get you gotta hype (but do we? and how much?) but you gotta fulfill those promises. In 2015 he promised FSD in 2017, in 2016 he said <2018, in 2017 he said 3 but no more than 6 mo, then later that year said 2 years, and I think it's been "next year" ever year since. It's a hard problem but you can only over promise so much. And over promising like this just makes him seem like either a conman or out of touch/naive.

After reading the Isaacson biography, it’s clear to me Elon is not a stable or trustworthy person. The evidence continues to mount.

You can't be serious. Musk is under investigation for manipulating stock prices back years ago. Anything shown on these events must be assumed fake until proven otherwise.

They still haven’t shipped the new roadster despite taking a pretty huge investment from customers for it.

less?

The full self driving was one year away for 15 years now.

Batteryswap charging, beating fuel pump station demo - clearly fake.

Tesla Truck beating rail - few trucks made to carry potato chips/crisps ie 99% air.

Solar roof tiles.

Optimus being used in Tesla factories.

The bus had an inch of clearance. What kind of road that prototype was designed for. Besides the wheels had tires painted over gold to look better. Lookup the pictures.

Do you even remember tesla roadster? Its coming out next year, trust me bro.

Cybertruck... more like clusterfuck. Offroad truck brickable by a carwash.

How do people have trust in any claims by Musk?

Ever heard of "fake it till you make it"?

Musk did say the vehicles were fully autonomous. He didn't say that for the robots.

I kind of expected them not to have human like robot AI or driving yet but the robo taxi surprised me by not seeming very practical. Would you want to be in an machine learning controlled vehicle where the doors rise up and probably can't be opened without computer assistance? Driven by software known for crashing into fire trucks and the like? At least Waymos have proper doors and backup lidar/radar to stop them hitting things.

No need for doubt. There's no reason to remotely operate the van since it's a vehicle like the car, and it is already known that they have mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years.

> And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.

And Boring Company salesmen...

> improving public transport with buses and tunnels

Who is working on this?

It's all about creating a high stock price, then take out a loan on the stock, and have a nice life.

Quite a few people at the event asked employees about this and were directly given the answer. It wasn't a secret.

Nikola (Trevor Milton) was busted for fraud for insinuating that trucks rolling down slopes were working models.

Did you know that many demos on events like Google IO are scripted or hardcoded? I'm saying that not to advocate for such practices, but rather to provide context.

For what it's worth, it was quite clear to many that the robots are teleoperated and it still serves as a demonstration of the hardware.

Fraud is a material misstatement of fact to induce someone to do something. It's really not clear that there's any actual inducement here; this isn't exactly the centerpoint of a pitch video to investors. (As it turns out, Tesla's stock went down like 9% the next day after the event, with most of the analysts' reactions to the announcement essentially being "okay, so he doesn't really have anything that he wasn't already pitching").

Musk's speech:

>So now one of the things we wanted to show tonight was uh that Optimus is not a canned video. It's not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please please be nice to the Optimus robots. So you'll be able to walk right up to them and um they'll serve drinks at the bar and uh you'll directly - I mean that's it's it's a wild experience just to have humanoid robots and it's they're there they just in front of you. Uh so yeah with that um let's party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6dbxPlsXs&t=1355s

So he didn't actually say autonomous. I think you'd have a job proving fraud there.

Didn't OpenAI demo facetime with a H.E.R. like chatbot/AI friend in April?

Where is that.. it's not available to anyone I know and was that actual real tech running or just faked demos? The tech playbook is hype even if it's not real and or really exists ... hype it up .. make them pay for the promise of something they think exists but it doesnt. Similar thing here Musk following the technology/startup playbook ... hype hype hype make people think it's real .. boost stocks as Open AI boosted it's subscription revenue Im sure in April of a promise of something that may or may not exist.

Reminds me of a plot of device of the 90's movie Shooting Fish where they were scamming businesses selling an AGI computer but were actually controlling responses with a human in another room.

It's AI - Actually an Indian

Hopefully, they will check for overemployment before allowing them to remotely control, otherwise we end up with one operator controlling several cars. I don’t know if it is good or bad

I mean, shoot me down here, but is it that bad of an idea?

If you're going to have an assistant or a taxi driver, and you start off at the base position of "AI is totally unreliable", then having a fully remote gig-worker remotely piloting your robot...

I mean, it doesn't seem like a massive stretch from what Uber does.

...and heck, having a 'remote robot body' is pretty cool tech.

I guess. As long as you don't use it to pretend its just AI for the meaningless purposes of generating hype about your AI that really isn't actually any good.

or you even have a single driver in charge of 20 vehicles, waiting for one of them to encounter a situation the system can't handle automatically

I mean, you definitely need people available to intervene even for a L4 or L5 autonomy, because they will get stuck (Tesla is not serious about robotaxis until they start staffing up a team to do that on a full-time basis). But actual driving? This link is way too high latency for that to be safe. The robot needs to be maintaining its own SA, and just calling the human when it doesn't know what to do.

Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures. The only danger would be if one fell over.

1x NEO looks awesome and far more advanced than this version of Optimus. I'm bullish on 1x. Tesla has a manufacturing advantage though. There were 50 units of Optimus at the event and I expect that there are only a few fully working units of NEO made so far. Also, Optimus has been improving quickly. It's possible Tesla could catch up in a few generations.

They didn’t say the extent of the control and the event was engineered to lead people to conclude human involvement was minor.

Saying otherwise when directly asked would have been an open-and-shut case of securities fraud. They still didn't widely disclose this.

Awesome, now show me where is the article coverage (which is generally paid PR) that states this upfront and clearly.

So these robots are not supposed to be autonomous?

Are Elon companies known for being trustworthy in marketing?

If they ever were that should have ended when FSD was first 'delivered'. With a possible carve out for SpaceX?

I don’t know. Despite being remotely controlled, their movements were smooth and human like. I mean it’s literal untethered bipedal robots walking around in the midst of a party. It’s already pretty incredible in my opinion and can only go up from here.

Or Teslas "battery swap" event which actually helped them earn them a huge amount of subsidies from the government. Watching after understanding Elons m.o. it is clearly fake or how else would they have a planned demo on stage with cameras that aren't positioned to show anything that's going on and then that tech they developed was never heard from again. They just distracted the crowd with a video of someone filling up at a gas station

Reference? Them being eventually autonomous has been covered in the events and his talks about the eventual AI that will drive them.

I might be an idiot but it wasn't obvious to me. Watching the demo of the robot standing stationary, responding to a customer ask for (and point to) cellophane bags of chocolate and then the robot grab and pass it to the customer seemed like a reasonable tech demo to show at an event like this and it impressed me.

I've worked in robotics for over 10 years, at state of the art labs and high quality startups.

There are really only two hard problems in robotics: Perception and Funding.

Perception, especially around a bunch of people, with depth, mapping, understanding traffic and gestures, all in real time etc etc will be a huge problem for these machines for a while.

Funding though? I doubt that's an issue right now.

I would imagine latency would be an issue if companies were considering teleoperation using staff in a country with cheaper labor. For example I work with people in India and China and they regularly complain about the several hundred ms of latency they get when using their American VDIs. That off the shelf lawn mower is going to be hard to control safely with all that delay, and there's also the risk of connection drops and the like. You would need a specialized mower with collision detection/etc. to handle this, and at this point you might as well discard the robot and just have a remotely operated mower instead.

However there are cases where this can work well, say in a factory handling dangerous chemicals with the teleoperator in an adjacent room. Or maybe it's doing some sort of task where delays and connectivity loss are acceptable.

What stood out to me is that the speed of the movements makes it clear the autonomous balance control just isn't there. You can simulate this: try to move your upper body while standing up without changing the balance or stance of your legs and hips - unless you move slowly you can't do it, whereas if you put any force or momentum behind it you'll feel yourself straining pretty hard to stay upright.

When you see the bits and pieces of behind the scenes for Boston Dynamics it's clear that's where a lot of the magic actually is (and also if you look at how say, Atlas moves) - by necessity it looks much more "natural" because to get any power or speed behind the motions the whole robot needs to actively compensate the movements (obviously having enough power behind the drive system to actually do it is also critical).

> To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation.

I agree but it is frustrating watching Elon like Michael Copperfield but thinking it is real like a 4 year old.

I don't see a clear advantage of Tesla against other competitors if he will launch it in a couple of years.

It's perplexing because Elon is effective at fundraising and pursuing challenging and ambitious goals.

However now Tesla cars are protected by a 100% tariff on competitors, and Elon is campaigning for Trump who is now promising 200% tariffs on imported goods.

The gigapress sounded like a good idea when I first heard about it bc it could reduce manufacturing costs, yet Tesla does not seem to have realized any significant improvements in 2024 from it, and needs massive protectionist policies to compete.

It's interesting to imagine the price and performance we'd be seeing (and all the new dealerships and service centers popping up) of Chinese engineered and manufactured EVs if it weren't for the tariffs. Surely there would be some very capable options in the $20K range that would eat the Model 3's lunch. But Elon has government protection to the rescue and so he doesn't have to actually win at engineering or manufacturing, only lobbying.

The fact that Waymo has lapped anything Musk has to offer made the entire spectacle cringey and sad.

It is clear they were in terms of starting off. But it was on a closed set - an undergrad could have coded what they showed.

Maybe that's the realistic future of 'self-driving' cars. A teledriver-assisted automous car. It just moves the cab driver from behind the wheel to behind a screen somewhere else.

Hey Chris, thanks for your continued diligence. This is actually a recent and related discussion, as the duplicate status suggests the same article has been posted twice (e.g. slightly altering a URL parameter to escape the HN dupe-detector).

P.s. If you found the content in one article to be better than another, it would be helpful to steer folks towards the more informative one. In this case, the above Bloomberg article is pretty substantial compared to the one you've linked as a "dupe". Take care.

But they did try to hide it. It's in some videos where one of them was trying not to admit they were remotely controlled and that "probably some AI is used"