Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant personal cybercab unveiling last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, serving drinks to guests, playing with them and dancing in a pavilion. Perhaps the most surprising thing was that they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.
This is of course clear when you watch the videos from the event. If Optimus really were a fully autonomous machine that could instantly respond to verbal and visual cues while speaking one-on-one with people in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing.
Attendee Robert Scoble revealed that he had learned that humans were “remotely assisting” the robots, later clarifying that an engineer had told him that the robots were using AI to walk, discovered Electrics. Adam Jonas, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note that the robots “relied on teleoperations (human intervention),” the outlet reports.
There are obvious signs to support these claims, such as the fact that the robots all have different voices or that their reactions were instantaneous and the corresponding gesticulations matched.
It doesn't feel like Tesla bothered to give anyone the impression that the Optimus machines operated independently. In another video this Jalopnik An Optimus voice then jokingly pointed out to Scoble that “there could be some” when he asked it how much it was controlled by the AI.
Another robot – or the human who voiced it – told a participant in a stilted synthetic voice, “Today I'm being assisted by a human,” adding that it wasn't fully autonomous. (The voice stumbled over the word “autonomous.”)
Musk first announced Tesla's humanoid robot by bringing to the stage what was clearly a person in a robotic suit. So it's no surprise that the Optimuses (Optimi? Optimodes?) were over the top in their presentation at last week's event. And the people who went didn't seem to feel upset or cheated by it. However, if you wanted to get a sense of how far Tesla has really progressed in its humanoid robotics work, the We, Robots event wasn't the place.