It sure seems like the Optimus robots at Tesla's event were under human control

submitted 3 weeks ago by AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today

electrek.co/2024/10/11/it-sure-seems-like-the-o…

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arent tech events always a propaganda show of "what we want it to be" and not what it actually is?

Is the future just having a human slave in a third world country strap into VR and carry your groceries for you?

That's basically what happens right now. Remember Amazon's smart grocery store? It was just people in India watching cameras. Computer vision wasn't capable of it.

AI (Anonymous Indians)

Makes me wonder how much of Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” is just some dude playing GTA VR with you in the passenger seat.

If it was actually that it would work better…

Have you seen humans drive? Now imagine them driving with significant visual and steering input latency, distorted wide angle cameras, and the lack of steering and acceleration feedback. Unless they are used to sim racing, I bet most people would drive worse than Tesla's FSD if done remotely.

Some footage of tesla's full self driving disagrees.

Well, I think the self driving taxis across the us apparently need human interaction every 6 minutes on average... So are they self driving? I don't know.

We can't use our phones and drive, but someone can have a screen and drive 6 cars at the same time...

And I only need human interaction every few days. Take that AI... :)

That would probably be better than waymo

I'm pretty sure this story was blown out of proportion and exaggerated. These people were training and validating the automated systems not watching the cameras 24/7.

That's how AI is trained, manual intervention. It wasn't working as well as they hoped, but it wasn't humans watching cameras in real time.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india

It sounds like the best way to bootstrap a machine learning system. You generate the data the system will be seeing in production along with the proper labels. Then in a later stage you can start doing reinforcement learning.

The problem is the lying about it.

I honestly don't see an issue with it. These robots aren't for sale, there's no estimated sale date, nor are they likely in production in any meaningful sense. Yes, he gave a price range, but that's obviously aspirational and not confirmed seeing as there's no expected release date whatsoever.

From the video I watched, it seemed obvious the robots were limited to a handful of interactions, such as:

  • hand gift bag to person - it certainly seemed to go through a certain routine each time, but the person seemed to be able to point at the one they want
  • rock paper scissors
  • fill and hand drink to someone (didn't see it in the video)
  • dance according to some choreography

There certainly seemed to be some AI happening (i.e. detect which bag, let go of gift, etc), but it seemed like a very on-rails experience.

And I got that from watching it live, not looking at someone dissect what was going on. Having a handler there to push the robot into one of a handful of pre-programmed routines seems absolutely reasonable.

That's not true at all. I personally know a person who worked on that technology.

Human beings got involved only when necessary. Do you really think Amazon wants to pay humans to be cashiers?

Do you really think Amazon wants to pay humans to be cashiers?

No but if they spend a bunch of money and time designing it, spend a bunch of time and money retrofitting stores, and then a bunch of time and money marketing it and the technology doesn't actually work when it's 'showtime,' I can easily see a company with deep pockets like Amazon faking it all by hiring dirt cheap labor to make it seem like it works rather than the alternative.

But the technology does actually work.

You don't come up with an idea, announce it to the world, and then start figuring out how to implement it.

Exactly. The people watching videos were doing QC, not actually operating the entire thing. Closer scrutiny with the first few stores makes a ton of sense (i.e. watching every interaction) because there will be a bunch of bugs. But as they scale out, I would expect a much smaller portion of videos to be actually watched live.

You don't come up with an idea, announce it to the world, and then start figuring out how to implement it.

Maybe in an ideal world but that's not the world we live in.

We live in a fucking nightmare. Rich assholes wining and dining with robots while most of the world fucking suffers. It's actually crazy. We are bringing into our reality what was just a bad dream like 50 years ago. This is just wild man.

All those sci-fi novels were meant as *warnings* not *instruction manuals*

I'm betting my two balls that Elysium becomes a real thing

Turk in a box you say? I'm shocked! Shocked!

The people apologizing for this sort of behavior, even here, just shows how easy it is to manipulate people.

Elon Musk *loves* a fake presentation.

Maybe there's a brain in there imported from some poor country.

See: the cyborg soldier subplot of Metal Gear Rising: Revengence

The real reason for the brain implant chips company… brains in jars controlling robots.

i'm expecting the first million optimus robots will be remote controlled by armies of 'trainers' and elon will claim the ai will use the footage to train itself to do everything later, but we need a trillion+ dollars of compute to achieve that, but the software and hardware required are simply not possible at any budget anytime soon. maybe its good enough to have mass remote slavery for some.

Similar to the company who just dressed up models as robots for their presentation

I feel that almost certainly that is where Musk got the idea from, it worked for them, etc!

Every conference/tech showcase is carefully staged to maximize investments.

Well, often times not Tesla.

This is still so weird to me. Couldn't they even lie right? Use a plastic window just for that car. Apparently it doesn't matter to tesla customers that the end product is shit.

I think the actual claim is that the truck in general is bulletproof (meaning the metal bits), not that every part of the truck is bulletproof. Here's a video testing that claim, it is bulletproof for certain calibers, but not for larger calibers.

Whaaaat? A company whose market valuation is almost entirely built on a perpetual lie about automation they are delivering “someday” lied about their ability to deliver automation??

I am shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

You remember the first time Musk talked about robotaxis? He never delivered. This robotaxi is another vaporware

Yeah, Tesla made this claim about the model X being full self driving in 5 years and being able to become an autonomous taxi while you weren't using it. Still waiting on that one...

He also said that it would result in an “age of abundance” where the cost of everything would drop dramatically.

This never, *never*, ever happens when they say it will happen. It's always the opposite. Prices go up, jobs disappear, new subscriptions appear, etc.

It may or may not, you as a consumer will simply never see it. Any costs savings gets gobbled up.

Question - assuming they are human controlled, how do these compare with bots created by competitors like Boston Dynamics?

They don’t. They are not competitors. This is not a product that exists as a real purchasable item. Those little robot dog toys are closer to BD than what Elon has done here.

I mean if drone pilots are cucking people and blowing them instead of blowing them up, I’ll take that as progress at this point

He [Elmo] referred to these as “your own personal R2D2 C3-PO,” and that in the long term, these robots would cost less than a car – specifically, ~$20k-$30k. A video also described them as an “autonomous assistant, humanoid friend” which could be used for basically any task you can think of.

Perhaps don't market things as something they're not?

Imagine paying 30k$ so that some guy in India gives you regular handjobs 🤦

Now imagine that’s your job 🤦

[deleted] 3 weeks ago

They're not marketing them as something they're not. They're marketing them as something *they will be*...

I mean that's probably false also, but my point stands.

It's incredibly misleading to just omit the fact that they're remote controlled but misleading is very on-brand for Tesla.

https://youtu.be/Q1QPXyebhiY?t=505

So what's our timeline here?

Not long! It will probably happen in our lifetimes. We just need to figure out... how to make it work

They're marketing them as something *they will be*...

That is false advertising—which is illegal.

[deleted] 3 weeks ago

LOL WTF? You think product concepts are illegal? 🤣

If you're lying to the consumer and not disclosing that it's a product concept, yes.

In this instance he is marketing what the final product is meant to do

He's been doing that with full self driving for the last decade and the event showed it might be a decade more. It doesn't give much confidence.

Is Tesla selling their fully autonomous driving cars yet?

A promise from Melon means nothing.

You're pretending as if he's just honest and this is just the most reasonable ways of doing things.

You're completely ignoring the intentional misrepresentation of the capabilities of the technology. The main point of the robots is to be autonomous, which they're not.

It's like if I were making some waterproof product and then made a huge presentation in which I have to avoiding getting any water on the product, while pretending they're immersed in water.

Which is lying. Miss selling conceptually in the UK. It would be illegal.

shouldn't market them as fully developed humanoid assistants, then.