201–210 of 246 posts
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I don’t know. Despite being remotely controlled, their movements were smooth and human like. I mean it’s literal untethered bipedal robots walking around in the midst of a party. It’s already pretty incredible in my opinion and can only go up from here.
Agreed. By next year they’ll be able to outsource the puppetry to a nearby developing country.
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?
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> these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones) Actuation is still a massive problem in humanoid robotics. We have over 650 muscles. A humanoid today can't even approximate that. Sure, a robot might not need that many actuators to be extremely useful. However, to be general enough to be able to interact with any human environment, the number of required actuators will not be trivial. Add to that gearing, co…
The big breakthroughs have already happened. - Small, powerful 3-phase servomotors are cheap and easy to obtain. Mass production of drone motors has advanced small motor technology considerably. Tiny motors use to be either toy-grade junk or expensive Swiss precision. That's improved. - Motors with built-in encoders are, at last, available. Encoders used to be fragile plastic boxes stuck on the end of the motor. Also…
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No need for doubt. There's no reason to remotely operate the van since it's a vehicle like the car, and it is already known that they have mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years.
>mostly functional FSD from the many owners driving Tesla cars these past years Given the staggering amount of mishaps that have been showcased, I would dispute this
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 s…
I kind of expected them not to have human like robot AI or driving yet but the robo taxi surprised me by not seeming very practical. Would you want to be in an machine learning controlled vehicle where the doors rise up and probably can't be opened without computer assistance? Driven by software known for crashing into fire trucks and the like? At least Waymos have proper doors and backup lidar/radar to stop them hitting things.
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It's perplexing because Elon is effective at fundraising and pursuing challenging and ambitious goals. However now Tesla cars are protected by a 100% tariff on competitors, and Elon is campaigning for Trump who is now promising 200% tariffs on imported goods. The gigapress sounded like a good idea when I first heard about it bc it could reduce manufacturing costs, yet Tesla does not seem to have realized any signific…
You’re simplifying things a bit here. The tariffs are to protect all US car manufacturers (who all have EV directives) from BYD, who was strategically subsidized by the government to crush EV companies, including Tesla [1]. Tesla would be able to compete much easier if we were to throw out the environmental regulations and better utilize slave labor [2]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/byd-got-…
Most of the US car manufacturers would have gone out of business in 2008 if the US government had not bailed them out. How can anything China is doing to help BYD compare with that? Yet Tesla still needs 100% tariffs on BYD vehicles to compete?!
Environmental regulations and alleged "slave labor" in China hasn't bothered the US government or US consumers for decades (most consumer goods are manufactured in China) yet somehow it matters tremendously in 2024 and necessitates 100% tariffs to protect US firms from competition?
Most of us lived through the era when the price per performance of computer hardware decreased rapidly and there was rapid price deflation on hardware that was only a few years old.
Right now, in 2024, American consumers should be benefitting from the far simpler design of EVs and car prices should be dramatically lower due to the benefits of EV tech. Car prices should have deflated but thanks to US policies entry level cars cost close to $30K now. The average price of a new car is $47,000
No, EVs do not need to be fancy, aluminum, giga-pressed luxury items! It's a battery and an electric motor and it should cost a LOT less than an internal combustion vehicle that has hundreds of precision moving parts.
We've seen the high quality engineering and low cost manufacturing China is capable of with scooters, hoverboards, etc. The essence of China's industrial policy is that in a few years some of those engineers start being able to design EVs that outcompete Tesla. Meanwhile in the US we are bringing back steel mills and coal fire power plants!
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 cla…
>So now one of the things we wanted to show tonight was uh that Optimus is not a canned video. It's not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please please be nice to the Optimus robots. So you'll be able to walk right up to them and um they'll serve drinks at the bar and uh you'll directly - I mean that's it's it's a wild experience just to have humanoid robots and it's they're there they just in front of you. Uh so yeah with that um let's party. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v6dbxPlsXs&t=1355s
So he didn't actually say autonomous. I think you'd have a job proving fraud there.
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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. Hu…
If you want to make a energy-unconstrained robot into a fully functional android, you have much bigger, fundamental problems.
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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.
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.…
There are others. Controls is hard! You need investment and to solve difficult engineering problems. But we have a pretty good idea that those things are solveable and can demonstrate success b/c they are engineering challenges, not things we fundamentally don't have an approach for yet.
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When people tell you who they are, listen.
I find this thread disturbing, and with 0 examples as to why you guys think that about him. Like what are these things he's written and said.