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Were Tesla’s Optimus Robots actually Autonomous (or Remote-Controlled by Humans)?

Date: 2024-10-13 | create | tech | robots | tesla | optimus |

Last week Tesla held a showcase event featuring its humanoid-like Optimus Robot. These robots mingled with attendees - holding conversations, dancing, and serving drinks.

The event itself was an impressive showcase of day-to-day robotics but a lot of people questioned whether this was actually an autonomous AI robot or just a highly advanced remote control device.

In this post we'll explore some of the evidence from the event to see if we can figure out which it is.

What were the Tesla Optimus Robots Doing?

At the party, the robots were seen in many different scenarios. Seeing them in these diverse settings gives us some context on how they behave so we can begin to make claims about how they achieved that.

We see robots walking onto the floor:

We see robots dancing:

We see robots serving drinks and chatting with people:

All pretty advanced things we haven't seen robots do at scale and in dynamic environments before.

Were these Robots Autonomous or Remote-Controlled?

It's hard to say definitively because we don't have direct evidence of how they were operated but we do have a decent amount of evidence that together make the autonomous argument unlikely.

  • We've never seen robots this advanced at scale. To couple this with advanced AI seems like a big leap.
  • We don't have AI this advanced. These are arguably advanced AI agents but we don't even have fully autonomous digital AI agents so it seems like a leap to say that they both accomplished this AND were able to solve for physically dynamic challenges.

From the video artifacts:

  • We see micromovements when the robot tries to pour a drink - this is pretty odd for a robot to do but 100% what a human would do
  • The robots do decidedly human things quickly and in response to dynamic changes. Things like responding to queries, holding multiple trains of thought, throwing up peace signs, etc. To do this autonomously would require large training data sets and smarter AIs than we've seen before (and Elon's AIs are typically not best in market)
  • The robots have different voices with unique accents that fluctuate and crack. This is possible to do with current AIs but seems like a weird thing to focus on - a much more likely explanation is it's from remote operators.
  • The robot voices simulate mic overload - like when you talk too loud into a mic and cuts the upper ends. Very weird for a machine to do this itself.
  • We have video evidence that these robots started off as remote controlled machines so it's very likely this is how they ran at the event
  • We have video where the robot (likely the operator) says that the robots are not able to be fully autonomous and currently require human inputs

Finally we have several reports (though not confirmed) that the only autonomous robots were the ones dancing in the gazebo (in a controlled environment separated from attendees). The ones in the crowd were being remotely operated.

So while we can't say for sure one way or another I think we have substantial evidence that it's very likely these robots were remotely operated and not autonomous as was implied.

What does this mean for the future of Autonomous Robots?

Even though these robots are likely not autonomous, this was still an impressive showcase of robotics. The robots moved pretty smoothly, were able to perform some diverse tasks, and the latency on the remote controls seemed pretty low. This seems to be a pretty large step forward for tele operated robots at scale.

Similar to the rise of remote controlled drones, these machines will likely continue to improve hardware-wise and sometime in the future will begin to implement autonomous modes. That said we probably won't see these fully autonomous robots til after we see fully autonomous digital AI agents which itself may be a ways off.

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This is not the first time we've seen Tesla make wildly inaccurate claims - Cybertruck's "bulletproof" windows falling to a baseball being a prime example. Amazon did smth similar when they revealed their "cashierless" stores were actually run by teams of people watching cameras in India and tallying up purchases.

But overall the Optimus Robots are an impressive feat of engineering and seem to be a big step forward in remote controlled humanoid robots capable of taking on a diverse set of tasks. Just note that they currently seem to require a human operator to function like this.

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