Optimus Robots, Self Driving Cars and Buses - Tesla's 'We Robot' Event and the Evolution of Optimus

Tesla Optimus Robot Serving Guests.
Image: Tesla

On the tenth of October Tesla held their 'We Robot' event, which I guess is the new incarnation of their previous Tesla AI Day annual event. There were three much talked about reveals, the driverless taxis, a driverless bus, and Optimus robots moving around the event, fully interacting with people 'on the ground'.

Tesla Driverless Taxi.
Image: Tesla

While it was cool to see so many driverless taxis, that you could get in and experience for yourself as they drove around the Warner Brothers lot, and the driverless bus was something of a surprise reveal nobody expected, my attention was on Optimus.

Tesla Driverless Robovan.
Image: Tesla

It was in September of 2021 that Elon Musk first announced his plan to create an affordable, humanoid, domestic robot, that would eventually be in homes worldwide. That vision was underlined with a person wearing a robot suit, that wasn't as well received as Elon may have liked, despite being a good visual of what the development team would be striving for.

Tesla Optimus, First Generation Concept to Gen 1.

A year later and Elon unveiled two humanoid prototypes. One a kind of 'proof' of concept made with off the shelf parts, the other a more streamlined model with custom Tesla designed parts. Neither model was particularly impressive, even for 2022, but it was clear progress had been made, and the second prototype kind of had some resemblance to the initial 'dancing man' vision.

December of 2023 Tesla announced the Optimus Gen II, a humanoid robot that looked very much closer to the dancing man vision of 2021.

While many were impressed by the Optimus robots interacting with the crowd at the WE Robot event, it has been confirmed that all these robots were actually operated by humans remotely and weren't using AI at all in their interactions.

Which for some, it seems, was disappointing but, from my point of view, was not entirely unexpected when recent behind the scenes footage on the Optimus project literally shows the robots being trained by human operators through remote operation.

Regardless I was still impressed by how far Optimus has come, and more importantly, how its development has pushed competition in the humanoid robotics space.

For example, 1X Technologies, a robotics company based in Norway and San Francisco, is focused on creating humanoid robots for your home, and plans to build 100,000 of its Neo Humanoid robots for the home by 2027. Which is not dissimilar to Tesla's timeline for getting Optimus into homes.

Prior to Optimus almost no one was taking the idea of humanoid robots in the home as a viable business model.

Personally I doubt I'll have have a full humanoid robot assistant in my home unless they come up with some kind of affordable leasing arrangement, the way they did for mobile phones. But I still like the idea of it.

Although I will be a little disappointed if the future is AI being built into all our appliances. I don't really want to have conversations with my dish washer, fridge, or drier about anything.

In the meantime I'll keep an eye on Tesla, and Optimus specifically. I honestly don't care if Elon doesn't actually meet his own deadlines when it comes to his projects. All that matters is that he continues to make progress.

Optimus Navigating Around

Comments

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review, Memory is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

TV Series Review: Velma (2023-2024) No Spoilers

A s a kid, Scooby Doo cartoons were something I used to watch fairly regularly. I wasn't a diehard fan but it was one of the better, of the many, cartoons I used to watch. I had heard about the new animated series, Velma , around the time of its release but it wasn't coming out on any streaming service I was subscribed to so it went off my radar pretty quickly. Quite by chance I signed up to a streaming service so I could watch DC Entertainment's, The Penguin, and noticed Velma was on that platform. I figured I may as well get my money's worth out of the subscription. I did know that Velma, herself, had been race swapped for the show, which made no real difference to me, though I do prefer classic Velma if pushed to choose. However the first episode of season one was a real shock to my expectations! No where had I heard this series was skewing very much into adult humor and themes. I was expecting something more along the lines of the original Scooby Doo show. Instead I...

TV Series Review: The Office - Australia (Prime Video) (2024) No Spoilers

W hile I'm a late comer fan of The Office, only watching after the original and USA versions were both available on streaming services, I did watch them in the order of release i.e. I watched the U.K. version first. Now, with the release of the Australian version of The Office on Prime Video, I think it's best to approach watching this new version understanding that it is not those shows. More importantly, remembering the US version was not well received or as popular as it has become since streaming became a thing. I personally remember people often saying the original version was better, back in the day. Of course, the Australian version has analogues for all the same characters you're familiar with from the previous versions, with their characteristics, so you can easily see who is the Aussie version of each character. While there are actually 13 different adaptations of the series worldwide, I was surprised to learn this is the first time the boss has been female. No...

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Trump's 2024 Election Win Will Change Everything - At Least I Sure Hope It Does!

Trump by Leonardo.ai & TET A s an outsider looking in on the US 2024 election, right up until election day, it is beyond my belief that the election continued to be a 'close race'. It is even further beyond my belief that Trump won, without question. Even if the Democrats wanted to claim the election was rigged somehow (which I'm sure Trump was gearing up to do had the outcome been different) it would be hard to make the case, beyond a recount. There's no slim margin here. Trump clearly won. While I would've preferred a Blue win, I at least got one outcome I was hoping for. A clear winner on election day. If I could give the Democrats some free, unsolicited advice for the next election. Stop targeting the opposition as if they're somehow selfish, evil villains. That's not how political parties work. At the end of the day the all represent the public. The people. The everyday citizen who you're trying to convince that you have what it takes to meet t...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

Movie Opinion: GhostBusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Some Spoilers

T here's one thing that can be said for 2016's, all female Ghostbusters reboot , and that is, it's not anywhere near as bad as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire . Although you don't realize it almost all the key moments of the actual plot are spoiled in the movie poster shown here. It's a wildly over thought, and overly convoluted story, with much exposition, that boils down to a big end level boss, a beam of light shooting into the sky, all the captured ghosts escaping, and all the Ghostbusters teaming up to clumsily restore order again by the end of the film. Side note: That mayor everyone thinks is a dick is the kind of mayor you want. He really knows how to get things done in record time. I've never seen a building get condemned and the legal tenants get evicted so fast, ever! There's not much here that this franchise hasn't done before, in every film, only this time everything freezes too because... I don't know, I drifted off during that expositio...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog