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. .
But hey, it's coming from a company that's selling something called Full Self Driving for the past 10 years, so the deception is not really that surprising.
Makes you wonder how Trevor Milton feels about all this - after all, they only stated in the infamous video that the truck is 'in motion' - never advertised it's 100% an 'autonomous motion' :)
Are you a Trevor Milton fan? I didn’t see as much merit in his body of work.
Btw, are we so sure that the cars shown were driving autonomously and not remotely operated ? Not that it's difficult to have a self-driving car in a cinema studio these days... But for all Musk said, 'there's no people in them', 'as you can see, the cars just going by with no people', 'fully autonomous' (like FSD ?).
(Don't get me wrong - it's a good company, that did achieve some impressive things in the past. But there are clear Enron vibes to me).