Tesla's Beer-Serving Optimus Robot Was Controlled by a Human the Whole Time

Not surprised. As I wrote yesterday, the videos of the robots performing household tasks look much smoother than the actual walking robots seen live.<p>Tesla is not doing well as a car company. Tesla needs a good, low-cost car. Something that can compete with the BYD Seal, which reviews indicate is a good low-priced electric car. BYD is taking over the world of electric cars outside the US.[1] Only tariffs keep them from taking over the US market. They have many new models at good prices. BYD even has a pickup truck now.<p>Tesla also is not doing too well in batteries. Despite &quot;Battery Day&quot; and other hype, Tesla failed at making cells themselves.[2] They buy cells from Panasonic and CATL, mostly. Panasonic has some plants co-located with Tesla, but they&#x27;re Panasonic technology.<p>Plus Tesla still has trouble with parts and service. The company is twenty years old now. They should have that figured out.<p>Tesla did fix its production volume problems. But &quot;according to its own figures, the electric automaker produced 46,561 more vehicles than it delivered to customers during the first quarter of 2024. Where are all these cars going? Parking lots at its factories, malls and airports.&quot;[3]<p>Tesla launched the electric car industry. But they&#x27;ve blown their lead. This is what happens when the CEO&#x27;s attention is elsewhere. Will someone please get Musk into drug rehab? He used to be good at this stuff.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;news-list" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.byd.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;news-list</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;17&#x2F;elon-musk-might-give-up-tesla-4680-battery-cell-end-of-the-year&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;electrek.co&#x2F;2024&#x2F;07&#x2F;17&#x2F;elon-musk-might-give-up-tesla...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;tesla-is-running-out-of-room-to-store-unsold-cars-1851473377" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jalopnik.com&#x2F;tesla-is-running-out-of-room-to-store-u...</a>

It&#x27;s obvious. Imagine the PR disaster if the robot &#x27;hallucinated&#x27; and said something inappropriate, or worse, accidentally pushed or hit someone. Why take the risk when everything needs to run smoothly?<p>The first time they showed Optimus, they literally had a human in the suit, so this is a huge step forward.<p>That said, a teleoperated humanoid body is an impressive tech feat by itself, seriously.

Guy owns two AI companies and still is a decade behind.

Can we agree that he is leading the company down a path which it will be really hard to come back from later?

The future is going to be so weird and interesting.<p>Imagine being able to control these things remotely and then walking a few of them into a bank to rob it. Then the robots attach the stolen money&#x2F;goods to a drone which then flies off to another point to drop off the loot to its threat actors and masters who then get away.<p>I suppose the price points of them will need to come down drastically before this becomes commonplace and normal. Leaving $150k of burner robots behind to steal $50k doesn&#x27;t seem that financially feasible.<p>We are gunna have a lot of new interesting laws in the pipeline.<p>Imagine having to solve a captcha to get into a building or buildings who have to install anti-robot traps and technology to prevent them from entering. We already have man traps, now we&#x27;ll need robot traps.

It’s all a Potemkin Village.

Of course it was.. Which dum dum still believes any of this is actually real? It&#x27;s all a wink wink, stock pump show which didn&#x27;t work this time.

They didn&#x27;t say otherwise, they showed robots walking around and doing things, but never said anything about not having people controlling them. It was clear that there was a person that was talking on the other end if you listen to the video. Honestly having 20 tele-operated robots walking around in a crowd is pretty impressive. I haven&#x27;t seen anything like that before.

Vid of remote control for Optimus, and some bots at the event admiting remote control <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;TroyTeslike&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845047695284613344" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;TroyTeslike&#x2F;status&#x2F;1845047695284613344</a>

The goal of this robot is not just to be as articulating as existing bots but to do so cheaply. so it’s, as often said, about the factory that makes them not the bespoke million dollar shelf pieces we’ve seen before. in some cases, like the actuators, they are making in-house, otherwise, the strategy is likely to be to use as many cheap existing hardwares as possible to get the movement without the costs of greater complexity. let the software handle the rest.

Chuck E Cheese&#x27; was more advanced

The robots pretend to work, while the audience pretends to be mystified.<p>&quot;People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses&quot;

Well, I mean (a) duh, obviously, but (b) if I was a tech company trying to build hype around something, I would start by _definitely not inviting Robert Scoble_. Not after the Google Glass Shower Incident.

Someone should bring a big faraday cage next time

So, ‘fake it until you make it’ is Elon’s success mantra

Imagine falling for this pt bardum act in the year 2024.

Impressive that the machine was that good of an avatar, but it was pretty darn suspicious all the robots had different accents.<p>I mean are we to believe that Tesla designed their robots to have a California dude accent, a Chicano accent, AND an Indian accent just for the hell of it?<p>I&#x27;d love to see footage of the backroom where they no doubt had a bunch of operators with Valve Indexes and VR headsets.

&quot;...Agatha All Along&quot;

The Musk grift continues…

I don&#x27;t buy it. The only evidence is the robot itself saying something vague. Their insistence based on flimsy evidence just screams irrational hate intended to inflame confirmation bias.