I’m not sure why everyone is positioning this as a “gotcha”. I may be off base, but was it advertised as 100% autonomous? I’m just impressed with the form factor, dexterity, and battery life. Feels like everyone’s grasping at straws to cast the event as a failure.
I agree. Also, especially in the extremely crowded and noisy context - what would have been the chances to have the demo working so well?
In fact, even if the robots worked very well autonomously, you would still have wanted a way to ensure that the demo is successful - the same way Steve Jobs did with the iPhone demo, Larry Ellison did with the Oracle servers demo, etc.
So many stories like that in the history of famous product launches.
The one thing that bothers me a little is that if you look at the robots dancing, they are only moving the upper body; their feet are always on the ground. I would have liked to see them having enough ability to dance and move the legs too… then, again, maybe the gazebo they were in was just too space-constrained, or it was just too risky to do that in the demo - given the crowd, and all the chaotic party context. When you set up a demo, you have to account for the edge cases where your product glitches, not just for what it mostly does very well.
Anyhow, these are all AI issues (as opposed to mechanical ones), and, at the pace AI is evolving, it is not hard to see how these types of issues get ironed out over the time horizon leading to the launch.
The Optimus demo did do a great job at actually making people see a world in which robots just roam around and interact with humans everywhere. .
Mechanical and electrical engineering are real work, too. Demonstrating progress on the physical machine might be interesting even if its software isn't done yet.
Given that the event was about the 'future of autonomy', yes people were expecting that products presented are autonomous. A lot of people were duped and a lot of media coverage assumed it was all autonomous.
But hey, it's coming from a company that's selling something called Full Self Driving for the past 10 years, so the deception is not really that surprising.
Makes you wonder how Trevor Milton feels about all this - after all, they only stated in the infamous video that the truck is 'in motion' - never advertised it's 100% an 'autonomous motion' :)
Clearly a rorschach for people. The cars were driving autonomously and the improvements in Optimus’ form factor were impressive, so to me it seems pedantic to complain that the bar tending and rock paper scissors weren’t 100% autonomous.
Are you a Trevor Milton fan? I didn’t see as much merit in his body of work.
Not a fan of Milton at all. The guy belongs in jail. But so do Musk with his lies and deceptions about Tesla.
Btw, are we so sure that the cars shown were driving autonomously and not remotely operated ? Not that it's difficult to have a self-driving car in a cinema studio these days... But for all Musk said, 'there's no people in them', 'as you can see, the cars just going by with no people', 'fully autonomous' (like FSD ?).
(Don't get me wrong - it's a good company, that did achieve some impressive things in the past. But there are clear Enron vibes to me).
> Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that while the Optimus prototypes were able to walk without external control using AI, employees stationed remotely oversaw many of the interactions between the bots and attendees during the “We, Robot” event.
> At least one video from the event displayed an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being “assisted by a human.”
I'm not saying the article is wrong, but I didn't see any definitive evidence of the claim, just an aggregation of speculation from other sources.
The closest assertion is the statement, "At least one video from the event displayed an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being “assisted by a human.”" But what did this mean?
Statements like, "Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas also wrote in a report that the bots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention)”," don't seem to explain how this analyst knew this, the degree of the intervention, etc. Maybe if I read the analyst's report it would be clearer.
I distinguish between two ends of a spectrum for human assistance/intervention. On one end, there's a guy behind the curtain with a microphone and perhaps another with mo-cap or some other type of RC tool to instigate the physical responses. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a person watching telemetry and "merely" providing critical corrections to error states as needed. Both ends of this spectrum qualify as human assistance/intervention, but I still have no idea where on the spectrum this event was.
