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Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

electrek.co

151–160 of 416 posts

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrial use will certainly happen. Personal use not so much though. By the time robots are feasible you'd be crazy to have one in your home. Like all new tech these days robots will be leveraged against you at every opportunity. They'll be constantly recording audio and video and reporting the events and contents of your household to companies and to the state. Maybe the legal changes will happen eventually to pre…

I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are. At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. I feel this…

> We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools.

Tesla tried this and it was a disaster. They had to rip a bunch of their robots out and replace them with humans.

There's still a ton of really fiddly tasks that specialized robots find really hard to do.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#152

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

Counter-argument: I remember seeing a talk by Andrej from a year or two ago and wasn't too impressed - it seemed like they had a huge amount of work left to do and put everything together for a reliable self-driving AI.

Everything they showed today, from the vision models to the path planning to labeling to simulation was bleeding edge. And they seem to have managed to put everything together in what appears to be a tremendous engineering effort. I can't see why they can't use a similar playbook for the humanoid robot and increase value over time. The vision framework they used for self-driving is fairly general and can probably adapted to humanoids. The action policy space is less re-usable but I suspect they have clever ideas on how to tackle that.

Musk may be bad at forecasting but he's darn good at selling stuff that half-works and then assembling a team that can execute on his vision.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel people said the same thing about him for SpaceX and Tesla back when he was just the wacky PayPal guy. Remember SpaceX's first launch was in 2006 (before the iPhone existed!) and it's only started getting really serious traction in the past 5 years. Elon's no stranger to things that don't have any "useful form" for well over a decade. I'm quite certain he's aware of the realistic timelines, and he sells a diffe…

I like Musk, and I've been following his progress since 2011. I always thought he seemed very intelligent and seemed to really understand what he was doing. However I have to agree with the person you are replying to. There has been the sort of myth going around that making rockets is hard. It used to be hard... 50 years ago. That is literally the technology Musk has been using for the last 20 years: 50 year old tech…

I'm no Musk fan but this

> If he had never pursued reusability he would have made far, far more money from his launch business.

Strikes me as short term thinking and not true, also. The plan is to sell tickets at $400,000 each to get to Mars. There doesn't seem to be any way to achieve that without reusability. The money to be made from founding the first Mars colony supplied with reusable rockets completely dwarfs some random launch provider on Earth.

SpaceX never was and never will be a simple launch provider. If that is your lens then you are missing the company goals of 1M people living on Mars.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a good point; Musk does sometimes announce things that essentially serve as a placeholder for "we're going to do this thing once the technology improves enough to make it feasible", and this is likely more of the same. But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting…

But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex. The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here. It seem…

But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#155
post #32

Reveals it with a person in a suit dancing to dubstep: https://twitter.com/TESLAcharts/status/1428540624203128837?s...

I assume this kind of behavior helps with the "Elon" brand surrounding his companies, but it just feels so overdone, unnecessary, and, as another person said in this thread, cringeworthy. I saw the iPod nano announcement clip this morning, where Steve Jobs has a camera zoom in on his jeans pocket, talks about how the Mini fit in you regular pocket, then pulled the Nano out of his coin pocket. It's a little silly and…

Sure, but the iPod nano was a great product weeks from being in customers' hands. This is a recruiting event for a decade+ project to do something that hasn't been done before.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can say that, but name another person with a more impressive track record of actual accomplishments.

It's quite interesting how people keep betting against Elon. The HN crowd should consist of mostly risk-tolerant personalities, but the majority of comments are negative. Regardless of what one might think of the feasibility, no other company in the world today are as ambitions as SpaceX and Tesla (+ Neuralink). Feels like what Apple used to be during the "one more thing"-era. Both Tesla and SpaceX has been discounte…

I mentioned in another comment that I think this has to do with the very human phenomenon of the narrative paradigm shift (a type of M. Night Shamalyn plot twist).

Goes something like this: The guy that took on the military industrial complex with his small little startup and actually won, with wild whacky ideas like landing rockets upright, and winning NASA contracts against the likes of Boeing and Lockheed, is actually not who you think he is.

He’s not?

Nope, even though he was one of the single strongest drivers of electric vehicles that is pretty much making the rest of the industry shift after the viability of electric was shown with Tesla cars. The truth is, he actually sucks.

Oh, what a plot twist. Wait, does this have a happy ending now that we know he’s a really a bad guy?

And then we fill in the redemption story.

It’s the creepiest thing, and I have no idea why we keep doing it.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still befuddled what the industrial applications are. At some point a car factory had people moving stuff around and screwing things in and out. Now we have arm robots and conveyor belts and other machines which do not resemble humans at all but are obviously way better. We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. I feel this…

> We still have humans involved but I think the best way to minimize how often they are on the floor is with better specialized tools. Tesla tried this and it was a disaster. They had to rip a bunch of their robots out and replace them with humans. There's still a ton of really fiddly tasks that specialized robots find really hard to do.

I'm sure there are but why would another robot be better?

If the problem is something like the dexterity of a stationary arm machine isn't good enough - I'm having trouble believing the dexterity of a moving humanoid machine would be different at all.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#158

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

I would like to see him run a hospital and maybe put a dent into the problem of the $200 aspirin.

talk to congress. it's a policy problem.

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#159

Musk seems to have fallen for the idea that since he's had great success in one or two areas, he can easily repeat that success in other areas, even if the difficulty is much higher and entirely different skills are required. SpaceX and Tesla are great achievements, but they are primarily stories of successfully implementing and improving existing technologies with innovative engineering and business practices (like…

Right. I mean how many years has Boston Dynamics been cranking at 'teaching' a robot how to walk like a human, and it's still a work in progress?

But of course Musk is going to bust it out in the next 16 months at most.

Just like FSD, "this year", "this year really", "this time we promise we mean this year", "this year, seriously folks".

Re: Tesla Announces a Humanoid Robot “Tesla Bot”

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex. The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here. It seem…

But if you really think about it, flipping rocket is a trivial toy problem in simulation. But useful humanoid robot is very hard even in simulation. Just look at some of the SOTA control theory research. Their simulated robots looks stupid.

Universal Healthcare is also a toy problem, but a true albatross concept beunricratically in the US. I say it’s a toy problem because we literally have copy and paste templates from most of the western world that we can use.

Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem.

I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.

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