Boston Robotics robots are over there doing backflips and the only thing I’ve seen Optimus do is in extremely controlled environments.
I'm not in robotics, but I look at humanoid robots and, while incredible examples of engineering know-how, they seem to be a long way from useful in commercial applications. Am I jhust ignorant of their true value? Seems like all I ever see them doing is parkour.
But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).
End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.
I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).
I doubt it, considering their accomplishments.
They certainly have accomplished amazing things. They had a lead that even five years ago was considered insurmountable. But they've made at best incremental progress, the kind made by mediocre engineers. The only novelty was the Cybertruck, which didn't live up to expectations and didn't open up any new domains.
SpaceX is still advancing, though even that is getting a bit of an asterisk if they can't get Starship to fulfill its promise.
Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.
Car companies typically invest in new models in the same segment in order to stay competitive with the other car companies.
(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)
If there was no competition (there is), and he met the price envelope he's talking about (Cybertruck suggests he won't), I can buy the idea that there's a market opportunity for a few tens of millions of humanoid robots which are even just 5% AI and 95% remote workers in VR headsets, just because this means you can get cheap 3rd-world wages running your "made in America*" factories.
But there is competition, and I don't think he'll meet his price target.
As for the AI: even when I forecast under the assumption of continued improvements of hardware and software, I see at least a ten year gap between any given level of self-driving car and a humanoid robot small enough and light enough to get into the driver's seat of a normal car and drive it to the same standard, and that's just for driving a car, not all the other things people like to imagine in a world where androids are good enough to generically replace human labour.
* insert any other nation as desired, it works in any place where wages are higher than the cheapest nation with reliable internet (modulo the TCO of the robot, which nobody knows yet).
This will lead to minds getting blown as all those "foreigners coming here and taking our jobs" whose deportation people demand, are now "working from home in a different country and still taking our jobs" and the US in particular will have to wrangle with how this is a first amendment issue because remote control is just speech isn't it?
And when we consider how the current AI boom seems to have come with a total lack of even the most basic security considerations in their usage, these robots, wether** AI or remote controlled, are absolutely going to get turned into Mr-Stabby-the-totally-deniable-assassin.
** pun not intended, but when I noticed the misspelling I decided the implications still worked as a joke.
I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.
Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.
Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.
I'm experiencing AI that is very fast, but also kinda dumb and thoughtless.
My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
Indeed.
Even with 9 million total cars sold, Tesla still has yet to solve for driving safely with no interventions across just the contiguous USA.
With a similar approach, a million robots operating for years is still a long way short of gathering the data needed for training an AI to autonomously operate safely in a full range of industrial environments.
(That said, IMO remote-controlled humanoid robots still make a lot of sense, they'd only need a little bit of AI to assist rather than to do everything; if I was in Musk's position, I would be selling that vision of the future rather than claiming fully autonomous AI-driven androids are anywhere near).
Tesla clearly has at least some AI chops, and if Musk can bullshit for long enough, they might have enough time to make these robots more than just props.
Tesla absolutely cannot keep it's valuation without a promise for it's delusional stock holders or actual massive revenue streams.