This results in me trusting Tesla less.
If this was fake, how do we know the robovans were not remotely operated? They might as well be too to get the stock price up?
There is no way to know. I am really doubting Tesla now. It wouldn’t surprise me that, in order to prevent mishaps during the event, everything is remotely operated…
People will say: that’s not true. But where did Tesla clearly specify this upfront?
I saw the initial fullscreen disclaimer. But that might also apply to the robovans right?
That was obvious to anyone with any experience with real-world robots.
Nice piece of machinery, though. Boston Dynamics' humanoids were clunky electrohydraulic mechanisms borrowed from their horse-type robots. All-electric is now possible and much simpler. Schatft was the first to get this working, and they had to liquid-cool the motors. Don't know if Tesla has to liquid cool. They do that in the cars, so they certainly understand liquid-cooled electric motors.
I suspect that body balance and possibly walking were automated. It's hard to balance a teleoperated robot manually, and robotic biped balancing has been working for years now.
I heard the initial walk out was fully automated.
They moved so smoothly, I was impressed
If I worked on Optimus I would be so angry about the decision to so this. Now nobody will trust the brand or the product. Stupid.
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?
It's all about controlling money that might go to more honest ventures.
Yes, humanity has engineers who are going to the moon, creating robots, investigating brain interfaces, improving public transport with buses and tunnels.
And there will always be monorail salesmen who try to soak up those investments, taking away from others.
How is stuff like this not considered fraud? This seems much worse to me than Musk's usual Tesla lies in which he is predicting some future capability. At least there is an argument that Musk believed it those at the time he said them or that they were optimistically possible despite being impractical. This seems to be material misrepresentation of the viability of one of the company's core R&D projects that Musk claims "will be the biggest product ever".
Quite a few people at the event asked employees about this and were directly given the answer. It wasn't a secret.
Were you at the event or do you have a source for that claim? I have seen video of one of the bots refusing to give an answer to that question and there were multiple articles in the wake of the event that couldn't come to any definitive conclusion so I'm skeptical of this claim of immediate transparency.
Is this the video you saw (posting below, for you and anyone who hasn't seen it).
While ignoring the question the first time, he did confirm that they were being assisted by a human. Perhaps not as clear as 'remotely operated', but that's about how I took the answer. YMMV.
No, the one I saw ducked the question multiple times so that video is more informative even if "assisted by a human" is still somewhat vague. I guess they just left what to disclose up to the individual operator making the level of deception dependent on who you happened to ask. Such a bizarre way to handle an event like this, but I guess that type of haphazard approach should be unsurprising for a Musk run company at this point.
Nikola (Trevor Milton) was busted for fraud for insinuating that trucks rolling down slopes were working models.
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.
The safety people got a hold of it, but they did end up releasing it, although it refuses to do a lot of simple stuff you ask it to.
I subscribed twice and felt screwed not going to subscribe again until i see a live in person demo and or a trusted tech news source saying its available to all with a video showing them using it. Is there a recent such tech news report saying and showing such? Be good to see it!
I did startups and played this hype and create fake content/news to boost metrics and saw results. And yet i signed up twice lol
That OpenAI demo is available right now to subscribers; I have access to it
What does everyone think about 1X's NEO? [0] They began from the idea of compliant robotics,[1] which seems to me to be a requirement for safe operation in proximity to humans.
Did Tesla make attendees sign a hefty liability waiver, since Optimus is not a compliant robot, or did they address the inherent problems some other way?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrLuUxv9gE (also remote controlled for now, while being trained)
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.
>Each robot had several human escorts, and the robots were limited to slow walking and a few slow hand gestures.
More importantly, the robots were limited to doing no real work. They just feebly pick up objects and place them somewhere else, which I am pretty sure doesn't require AI.
For example, the vid shows the robot pouring hot water into a glass with a massive funnel strapped to it. Why not have the robot fill the kettle, place the teabag itself, etc? It seems like the kind of thing that should be developed before walking and talking and telling jokes.
What if the refrigerator, microwave, etc. could interface directly with the robot. For example, the refrigerator has some type of robotized shelf that is able to bring a rack of orange juice to the front before the robot comes over to grab it? What if the microwave is able to focus the microwave beam on the food to cook it evenly?
It also irks me how the robots are just humanoids. Like for example, why have a head with two eyes. Does it need to wear a helmet? Does it need exactly 2 eyes at exactly human-like placement to achieve stereopsis? Why not have 3 eyes? Did the designers think about the form of the machine at all, or did they just produce robots in the form that is associated with the most hype and thus will bring in the most investor capital? Is this really the ideal form for interfacing with humans? With other robots?
I am just very skeptical of these companies that want to go from zero to doing everything. By the time they accomplish a robot that can do "everything", who is to say that they will even be able to privatize it? The "everything robot" might just be built out of general-purpose components and software at that point. Why not just make a machine that does a limited set of tasks well and then build from there?
Sorry https://blog.comma.ai/a-100x-investment-part-2/ has me coping and seething at the AI space
Right now, 1X and Tesla use entirely different mechanical architectures, don't they? Do you think that Tesla will end up with compliant robots?
Tesla is getting closer with tendon-based hands in the next generation of Optimus. Who knows where they will end up.
Elastic tendons seem like a pretty reasonable solution to this problem, but can it be applied to all the joints (like ball-socket, etc.) I wonder?
I think the chassis of the robot should also have compliance, humans certainly do have squishy spines. I mean imagine you're on the street and you have to share sidewalk space with these things. Running into it would hurt.
The tendons are as inelastic as possible. The compliance comes from direct drive motors with no gearing (or as minimal as possible).
A few generations of what, pretending their robots work?
Honestly, I don't know why I bother continuing to engage here. HN community, is this the quality of discourse you want to encourage?
We had people swearing up and down that the Cybertruck would never be released because it was stock fraud. They already seem to be at a run rate of $1.5 billion in revenue per quarter despite launching in a limited fashion because of manufacturing ramp up.
I haven't really been tracking this, but aren't they selling at a price much greater than they originially announced? I would classify it as "mixed success"
The base model isn't entering production until next year but is quoted by Car and Driver as starting at $62,985. The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then, and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price. But I think the extra 4 years of delay (for the base model vs the announced availability date of 2021) is the bigger issue.
But ultimately all that matters from Tesla's perspective is that they are selling. My understanding is that even the current top end expensive models are selling about as many units as all other electric trucks combined.
> The original price was supposed to be $39,900. However there has been >20% inflation since then
That price was announced with a significant lead time, so at least 5-6% inflation was built in already.
> and the base model should be eligible for the full $7,500 tax credit applied as an instant rebate at purchase time, which was not available at the time of announcement.
It wasn't available that exact moment, but it existed.
> All that to say: the price actually paid will be $55,485, vs the inflation adjusted original base model price of $48,912 (possibly higher if there is more inflation before the release next year). So yes, the price you'd actually pay has gone up 13% in real terms over the announcement price.
I'd put the inflation-adjusted price at $46k, and not use the $7500 to reduce the difference, making $63k a 36% increase. Or I'd apply the $7500 to both and get 44%.
Surprising absolutely no one, I hope. Credibility seems difficult to generate for Tesla events. Maybe the secret sauce for Robotaxis is a human driver somewhere watching the cameras. Like driving Uber but from the comfort of home, and it's easy to hit the fridge or bathroom between rides.
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.
Also reminds me of amazons cashierless grocery stores
I mean, that's a classic for literally centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
It's AI - Actually an Indian
As I I see the delivery robot do it’s job... a game being played by remote workers doing the Enders game.
The terrifying secret of all those European truck simulator games.
Now I am going to be forever haunted by all those trucks I destroyed
You may already know this but Heinlein wrote about waldos pretty early, incorporating it into several stories and books.
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, 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.
> Is it that bad of an idea?
Driving at 60mph with shaky internet connection? Absolutely.
Piloting a robot to fold laundry? Maybe not.
Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
It seems like there's considerable demand for human labour "below the API" that you don't have to talk to. It's kind of sad but people seem to get comfortable with it very quickly.
> Allowing random people to pilot robots in your house with children around? Absolutely horrific.
Your risk analysis on this is completely wrong. If there is some vetting here this is fine. No different than a babysitter or a handyman off the Internet
You're saying then that tools exist to scan and ping all babysiters and handymen across the globe, fingerprint them for version, lookup zero-days, apply them to matching staff, exploit that to monitor children remotely, and take control over home assistants function to shepard children out the door to a "party van" ?
That's the ecosystem that surrounds most actual IoT devices - I can't see home robots being any different.
The Pied Piper, in robot form.
Who gets a babysitter off the Internet?
Apparently at least everyone who keeps this website going, at least: https://www.babysits.org/
The problem is it was presented in the most manipulative and deceptive way possible.
>but is it that bad of an idea?
yes, operating any kind of heavy machinery over a shaky wireless WAN with hundreds of milliseconds of latency and multiple percentage packet loss is, in fact, a bad idea
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.
It's amazing to me just how far people will move the goalposts for Elon's perpetual grift.
We've gone from "you'll be able to nap on your morning commute in your self driving car within 18 months" to "they will always need a human to intervene".
Incredible
Errr, I am saying that Elon's claims are obviously BS until we start to see Tesla doing something like what Waymo has had for years(1): a team of people ready to intervene and fix things that are outside the training set of the ML.
I happen to know a senior person at a autonomous delivery robot company, which employs a team of people for just this purpose, because even delivering pizzas around a college town in a small little robot needs this. For things like (actual example for them) a sofa that was being thrown away and was just left on the sidewalk, and so a human needed to confirm that it was safe to move around it. And so far as I'm aware, Tesla isn't doing this, which is why I think that their autonomous taxi idea is nonsense.
1: Personal experience from being driven in a Waymo, I hit the assist button when we got stuck by some double parked cars in a parking lot. By the time someone answered the car had already extricated itself, but it didn't start that until after I hit the button.
Elon Musk has displayed incredible prowess at manipulating modern internet media. He launched "tesla shorts" right when a few big short sellers announced their positions (I believe one of them also put out a report about TSLA being insolvent aside from income from pre-orders, and was proven correct by Musk years later) and SEO-ed them into the ground.
I would assume that several of the pro-elon accounts on most social media are actually either bots or shills. You don't need many shills to get real people interested.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to said anything about Elon Musk in this case
Not directly, but he and Tesla are unfortunately inextricably linked.
Tesla was not trying to hide this. The robots were telling anyone who asked that humans were helping control them. Unlike the robotaxis, which were explicitly advertised as autonomous.
They didn’t say the extent of the control and the event was engineered to lead people to conclude human involvement was minor.
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?
Saying otherwise when directly asked would have been an open-and-shut case of securities fraud. They still didn't widely disclose this.
Discussions
(112 points, 1 day ago, 108 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41831009
(89 points, 2 days ago, 92 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
It’s so funny to me when people still believe Elon when it comes to this or deadlines. I used to work for him and he always overpromises
Friendly reminder that in 2017 he was saying a car would drive autonomously from LA to NY in a year. It is now 2024 and that has not happened.
Friendly reminder that Tesla Semis are still not fully delivered and running.
Friendly reminder that the Roadster 2 is not rolling off the production line (people put down deposits too)!
Artificial artificial intelligence.
I was assuming that the robots at the Sphere also had some humans behind it if nothing more than to help "guide" the AI pieces. My assumption, at least.
Figure 01 does the same thing.
To be honest, the autonomous control of the robot seems like the easier part of the equation. (doing it safely in a room with guests, unguided... thats another matter). The physical limitations and packaging are a big challenge, and I dont think I saw Optimus lift anything remotely heavy.. just pull a beer tap.. a decision that probably speaks volumes about current limits of the technology.
To apply my first point to reality: put an Optimus in its current state/capability, on a commercial 0-turn lawn mower, plug Optimus into the mower's power takeoff, and have someone in another country remotely pilot the mower. That right there is worth every commercial lawn service having at least one on their crew TODAY.
The appeal of hot swapping an operator real time on the equipment you already own, whether it's a push lawn mower or a huge mining truck, provides enormous value right out of the gate. Especially in tasks where the Optimus can handle 90% of the task autonomously but needs to step aside or oversight for the last 10% of the job. Compare to a business model that requires purchase of all new very expensive and unique equipment.
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'm also a roboticist. Perception and funding are hard. But don't forget battery energy density, and the power-to-weight ratio and energy efficiency of actuators. Also very very hard, and Moore's law helps not at all.
Autonomous cars are in a nice niche since they store vast energy for actuation anyway, it's OK to be heavy, and the controls are relatively simple. They are limited by perception and decision making.
Humanoids are way more limited by energy storage and actuation. Animals are absurdly efficient.
Battery density is only an issue if these things are spending most of their time moving long distances. If you are targeting a drop in replacement for a human worker who is spending most of their time at a workstation, it can be plugged in while working. Even in a scenario where the robot can not be connected to power while working, that's easily solved with redundancy - get two robots, one works while the other charges. Obviously better battery life is a nice to have, but it's not an impediment to large scale adoption the way other big robotics problems are.
Tangential question: are there any actuators out there that mimic the animal muscle tissue, i.e. swelling laterally in order to shorten a tendon and pull a joint? This seems like a very elegant method compared to servos with all sorts of slack and rigid positioning. I'm not a roboticist so I'm not familiar with state of the art in actuators.
They exist, but they're inefficient compared to ordinary motors.
That surprises me. I thought motion planning and motor control would be harder - old memories of Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs, the clunkiness of a robot aligning itself perfectly with a drawer before executing a scripted-looking action to pull the handle, the obvious recorded sequence Atlas uses to get up from a fall. I know Boston Dynamics does impressive acrobatics, but it's all legs and no arms.
Are kinematics and planning solved now? I want to move into the field so I'm trying to learn.
> Asimo falling helplessly trying to climb stairs
IIRC, that wasn't a control problem but a mechanical failure of a gearmotor shaft.
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.
Let's see, New York to Mumbai over the Earth's surface is maybe 12,500 km, assume a direct fiber optic cable where light travels noticeably slower than in a vacuum at 200,000 km per second... So a minimum of 62.5 ms one way with the best terrestrial equipment.
While one can play network games at 125 ping, it relies rather heavily on tricks that only work in a virtual environment. (Back in the '90s I used to play with 300 ping, no latency compensation, uphill both ways.)
Realistically it's in the several hundred range. I just did a ping using Vultr's Looking Glass from New Jersey to Mumbai and got around ~240ms on commercial fiber. For people working from home in India (with cable/DSL overhead + distance from the IX) connected to servers in LA I regularly see 300-400ms.
Also keep in mind in a VDI or teleoperation setting there's not only network latency but additional delay from the video encoding, compression/packetization, and decoding on the other side plus a bit of buffer. Honestly I think cloud gaming is a good test case for this - and in my experience that only works well when you have fiber and have the game server in the same city as you (basically <10ms).
Don't get me wrong I think this guy's idea is incredibly stupid. But, have you ever operated a mower? They're not fast. A few hundred ms of latency on a mower is no problem at all.
> 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.
David Copperfield is the magician’s name, if that’s who you meant
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).
Reminiscent of Nikola's semi truck demonstration...
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
That event was a huge disappointment. It's clear that Elon didn't consider it to be that important and didn't put any real effort into it.
There was nothing an investor could look at and get excited about, it was the same thing as he announced 5 years ago. Just now his self driving cars have been eclipsed by Waymo and cruise seems to have caught up to what they can do with their demos.
And why show the robots at all if they were just remote controlled by employees.
I love all the "the fraud was so blatant it should have been obvious" comments.
Musk actually used this argument in his stock price manipulation trial, and the jury bought it.
...
"This is awful! This is nothing like the Hell I visited two weeks ago!" Bill Gates responded. "I can't believe this! What happened to that other place, with the beautiful beaches, the beautiful women playing in the water!?"
"That was a demo," replied St. Peter.
also ED-209 from robocop, "You have 20 seconds to comply."
Mechanical Turk Robotaxis! The civilian version of drone pilots.
I mean, that should have been obvious to anyone after calling it: [0]
The 'fake it till you make it' fraud will just make everyone building so-called AI companies look bad and heavily faked with events like this.
But there is still time for the Theranos of AI to reveal themselves. (It is not Tesla Inc.)
No shit.
Actually, I won't be surprised if it turns out that the 40 or so cybercabs were remote-controlled too.
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.
There's a company in vegas that pilots a rental car to you so you can be picked up anywhere and when you hop out, it drives off. You rent by the hour or something like that
Waymo has been demonstrating fully self driving cars for years.
Teslas also do it, and truly necessary interventions are rare these days.
Waymos have some very advanced teledriving features, and it's not clear to me how often the human is involved when you ride a Waymo.
I sort of hope that it's not that often, but I also thought the amazon store was automated.
Waymo vehicles are not driven remotely. Remote assistants give the autonomy stack suggestions for how to proceed rather than drive the vehicle. This doesn't require a low latency connection and the robot is still capable of stopping when the situation changes or proceeding as soon as it's able to without a control handover.
they already have that, it's called human-in-the-loop (HITL) assist. They usually take over when a problem needs to be escalated to a human agent.
[dupe]
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815567
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.
Dupe means duplicate discussion. There is an earlier discussion on this news story with plenty of upvotes and comments. Stop splitting up the threads, especially when it's a news story already developed from multiple days ago. Got something to add? Share it over there. Even maybe suggest the link over there in some cases even as a replacement article option. Stop splitting up threads and forcing us to repeat ourselves over and over. The discussion is over there.
I think it was fairly obvious from the show that the Optimus bots were remotely operated. Not like they tried to hide it at all. Just listen to the responses of the bots, they practically admitted that.
The cars, however, were almost certainly running the latest FSD (or some near future unreleased version).
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"
I read that "probably some AI is used" as that it's human controlled. Otherwise it would have been "completely AI controlled" or something similar.
I think "AI" did control their walking. Although calling that AI is probably a stretch.
Balancing or some movement mechanisms could be using AI.
Why would they, though? Aren't those doable just with flat our regular code plus isn't AI slow?