Last week, Elon Musk unveiled the latest iteration of Tesla’s ‘Optimus’ robot at their ‘We Robot’ event, held at Warner Bros studios in Los Angeles. “I think this will be the biggest product ever, of any kind,” Musk said, noting that everyone on the planet would want one. “It can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.”
After having already announced the ‘Cybercab’ and ‘Robovan’ earlier, Musk introduced the Optimus robot – billed as an “autonomous assistant, humanoid friend” in publicity videos – at the end of his presentation. Until now, it had only been seen in promotional videos – but Musk brought a whole group of them out into the crowd as the exclamation point at the end of the event:
One of the things we wanted to show tonight is that Optimus is not a canned video, it’s not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please be nice to the Optimus robots. So you’ll be able to walk right up to them and they’ll serve drinks at the bar.
And that is exactly what happened, with event invitees engaging a number of Optimus robots in conversation, and being served drinks by an Optimus bartender – and from the videos posted on YouTube and social media, most seemingly assumed that the robots were acting autonomously, with advanced AI providing chat functionality:
As soon as I saw the videos though, it seemed obvious to me these were in fact not autonomous, but were likely being tele-operated by humans, who were also providing the ‘chat functionality’. Sure, AI has come a long way, but the way the Optimus robots interrupted conversation, spoke in different voices (and using casual contractions of words often), and sometimes physically reacted to people’s actions despite not being prompted (e.g. throwing a peace sign at a camera that was not its primary focus at the time), were a distinct ‘tell’ that a human was involved.
Which makes it mind-blowing to me how many of these ‘tech guys’ who were invited to the event seemed to fall hook, line and sinker for it – no doubt a consequence of having drunk a little too much of the Tesla Kool-Aid, given most were investors or fan-bois.
Most criticism, however, should be reserved for Tesla and Elon Musk, as there was absolutely no clarification from them – either during the event, or in subsequent days – as to whether the robots were autonomous…even after being explicitly asked by media.
In fact, according to well-known tech reviewer Marques Brownlee, Tesla staff explicitly misled him about the robots’ capabilities:
Even the language used by Musk – “the Optimus robots will walk among you” – invoked science fiction tropes of other intelligences now existing alongside us. The only ‘official’ confirmation was a begrudging acknowledgement from one of the ‘robots’ on the night, when pushed.
And this isn’t even the first time Musk has tried to sell the Optimus robots’ capabilities as being more than what they currently have – earlier this year, he posted video of one folding clothes, only to have to clarify that it was using tele-operation when viewers noticed a stray hand in the frame.
The whole farce brings to mind the infamous ‘Mechanical Turk‘ – an 18th century chess-playing ‘automaton’ that was able to beat most human opponents it played against (including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte). The Turk toured around Europe and the Americas for eight decades before it was destroyed in a fire – only later was it revealed that it was in fact a fake: a human chess master sat within the ‘machine’ and made the chess moves during the games that it played.
For sure, it’s always cool to see advancements in technology, and the Optimus robots’ movements did look very fluid and flexible. But it should also be noted that Boston Dynamics had a robot doing parkour six years ago, and Honda’s Asimo robot was serving drinks more than a decade ago, so Tesla are hardly setting the pace here.
What might be more important is the heft of Tesla as a company and Musk as the current richest person on the planet – they have the financial and manufacturing resources to produce at scale, from the battery power pack through to the mechanical parts, as well as no doubt the ability to attract some of the finest minds in robotics.
But it still leaves the question unanswered: why the obvious, and frankly shameful and unforgiveable attempt to ‘sell’ Optimus as having more impressive capabilities than it currently has? Was it an attempt to pump the Tesla share price, suggesting that another lucrative new product was on the horizon?
Or was it just now-typical Barnum-style over-promising from Elon Musk – who, it is becoming ever more clear to most observers, regularly over-hypes the technological progress that has been made by his various companies…from the FSD (full self-driving) capability of Tesla cars, to his timeline of putting humans on Mars.
We seem to live in a time where lying and fraud are common-place and most people barely blink an eye at it anymore – but it really does stagger me that there hasn’t been more criticism of Tesla and Musk for their ‘Mechanical Turk’ presentation.
