In 2021, Elon Musk presented a humanoid robot that turned out to be a guy in a suit. A year later, we saw a prototype version of the robot – this time it wasn’t a guy in a suit – and thought it was “pretty cool”, primarily because of its ability to walk slowly without falling over. At a Tesla event called We, Robot last night Musk unleashed an entire team of machines, making some truly crazy promises about what they would be able to do.
“It will be able to do anything you want it to do,” Musk said during the presentation. “It could be a teacher or looking after children. He can walk the dog, mow the lawn, go shopping. Just be your own friend – serve drinks, whatever comes to your mind will do it. It’ll be great. I think it’s going to be the greatest product of all time because I think every one of the eight billion people on Earth is going to want an Optimus buddy, maybe two of them.
“One of the things we wanted to show today was that Optimus is not a canned movie. It is not fenced off. Optimus robots will walk among you… You will be able to approach them and they will serve you drinks at the bar.”
And the Optimus robot actually served drinks at the bar during the afterparty. But with one little catch: By Jalopnikthe robot bartender and other people present at the party were monitored at all times by Tesla employees.
As far as I know, it’s not confirmed at this point, but the polished movements and naturalistic conversations with partygoers give off extremely robust “remote control” vibes. Others on social media reacted similarly:
Any bets on where Tesla keeps the guys operating these robots? pic.twitter.com/a4aJBAoN87October 11, 2024
Not quite artificial intelligence? Not AI at all. It’s totally worth celebrating low-latency remote control, but it’s totally unfair to demonstrate them as autonomous robots – call it a parlor trick. https://t.co/EdXuSO8KWAOctober 11, 2024
The movements were quite polished, so the equipment and actuators appear to be quite functional, but it is clear from all the videos released that each Optimus was remotely controlled by a human while interacting with the various guests. $TSLA #TeslaRobotaxi #TeslaOptimus https://t.co/7v1tGM1c8hOctober 11, 2024
How Ars Technica As he noted, Musk did not say during his presentation that the robots were powered by artificial intelligence or were in any way autonomous, something he would certainly have emphasized if it were true. This isn’t to say that Musk has a deep commitment to truth and honesty – the historical record rather strongly suggests otherwise – but I think it would be a little too simple to get caught spouting nonsense when dozens of people are walking around doing this stuff. It’s possible that the company simply wants to encourage competition speculation or avoid telling competitors how advanced its robots actually are, but given Musk’s penchant for making substantial, broken promises in the past, I don’t think that’s likely.
Look, is it possible that one day autonomous bipedal robots will walk among us, take our dogs for walks, pick up groceries and mow our children? Sure, why not. But will it happen next year or in the next 10 years? As with fully autonomous self-driving cars and humans on Mars, I certainly wouldn’t bet on it.
I’ve reached out to Tesla for more information about the robots at yesterday’s event and will update this if I hear back.
