Tesla Makes ‘Autonomous’ Robot Look Cooler With Sped-Up Video
- by Gizmodo
- Oct 17, 2024
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@elonmusk
lets all of us talk for days about how it isn’t AI then releases this video,” Scoble wrote on X.
To be clear, Scoble thinks the video is impressive and apparently a true demonstration of AI, despite not actually demonstrating anything cutting edge that can be honestly verified. But others on X were confused about Scobles wording, just as we were.
“I don’t get it, so Optimus was actually autonomous when it handed over stuff during the event after all? I thought people and engineers said it was tele-prompted?” another person asked Scoble.
“No. It was human controlled much of the time,” Scoble replied. “They were working on a separate build. The one for the demo was limited to avoid mistakes. But now I’m wondering if more than I thought was AI, like the pouring of the drink.”
A human-assisted Tesla robot known as Optimus pouring drinks at an event Oct. 10, 2024 at Warner Bros. in Burbank, California. (Screenshot from a video by Robert Scoble)
Tesla never did get back to Gizmodo when we emailed questions about just how autonomous the robots at the “We, Robot” event were. But the new video doesn’t actually show anyone getting poured a drink either. The Optimus just hands people a bottle beverage and we still don’t know how much human interaction is involved in this process. We just have to take Tesla’s word that it’s AI and “autonomous.”
There’s also the tether attached to Optimus in the video which is never explained, which we’ve circled in yellow below. The robot bartenders at the Tesla Cybercab event didn’t have any visible tethers.
Screenshot: Tesla / X
Musk has a long history of trying to make his projects look much more impressive than they actually are. Back in January, Musk tweeted a video of Optimus folding a shirt. But the demonstration accidentally revealed there was a person just-off camera who was remotely operating the robot. You could see the human’s hand dip into frame sometimes, as we’ve highlighted with the red arrow in the GIF below.
Tesla’s robot competitors started adding the words “no teleoperation” to their videos in the months after Musk’s attempt at pulling the wool over people’s eyes.
Bloomberg’s coverage of the new Optimus video doesn’t note the editing or the tether or anything else with skepticism, but they did get a fun little detail: “Musk personally approved the video, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing company operations,” according to Bloomberg.
The billionaire Tesla CEO isn’t the first person to fudge robot demos. Back in the 1950s, the U.S. intelligence community helped put on a robot demonstration for the Soviet Union during a tech fair in Moscow. The Soviet onlookers were told that a robot vacuum was working autonomously and the presentation tried to suggest that the average U.S. household would soon have these kinds of things. In reality, there was a guy sitting behind a two-way mirror with a remote control.
Some things never really change.
Were Optimus robots faked?
Oct 17, 2024
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