Tesla AI Day 2022

[Yazata]

This Friday September 30 will be the second Tesla AI Day. It's expected to start at 5PM PDT/8 PM EDT, but that might change. It's supposed to happen in Palo Alto California not far from my home. Unfortunately it's invitation only.

But all is not lost! It will be livestreamed, and literally millions of people around the world are expected to be watching.

I don't know the url for the stream yet, but it will be announced soon and I'll post it here.

Last year's was an event for hardened geeks, since it featured a deep dive into Tesla's self-driving architecture and its neural network computing, about how it extracts features from each of a car's cameras and combines them into a single vector space representation of the car's environment. Lots of hard-core tech stuff.

Here's a video of last years event, which started about 45 minutes late, so skip ahead to 46:54

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M

This year's AI Day was originally scheduled for August, but it was pushed back to the end of September because of what everyone anticipates will be the unveiling of the first actual Teslabot, which the company calls Optimus and was publicly announced at last year's AI Day. So this year's AI Day may be more about AI in general than just about AI specific to self-driving cars.

[Image: ?u=https%3A%2F%2F1501573522.rsc.cdn77.or...ipo=images]

[Yazata]

First glimpse of an actual Teslabot in action. It's an early prototype and doesn't have its sleek skin. It doesn't move nearly as freely as Boston Dynamics' Atlas but it has much better hands. Apparently its onboard computer is the same computer found in Tesla cars.

Elon says that this unveil of the Teslabot is the first time it has operated without a tether. (And it didn't kill the audience, like robots always do in sci-fi movies when they are unveiled.)

https://twitter.com/teslaownersSV/status...0910006272

[C C]

And likewise pretty much the expected response, regardless of which way the product actually went.
- - - - - -

For Better or Worse, Tesla Bot Is Exactly What We Expected
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tesla-optimus-robot

EXCERPTS: At the end of Tesla’s 2021 AI Day last August, Elon Musk introduced a concept for “Tesla Bot,” an electromechanically-actuated, autonomous bipedal “general purpose” humanoid robot. Musk suggested that a prototype of Tesla Bot (also called “Optimus”) would be complete within the next year. After a lot of hype, a prototype of Tesla Bot was indeed unveiled last night at Tesla’s 2022 AI Day. And as it turns out, the hype was just that—hype.

While there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the humanoid robot that Musk very briefly demonstrated on stage, there’s nothing uniquely right, either. We were hoping for (if not necessarily expecting) more from Tesla. And while the robot isn’t exactly a disappointment, there’s very little to suggest that it disrupts robotics the way that SpaceX did for rockets or Tesla did for electric cars.

[...] It’s far, far too late for Musk to be attempting to set reasonable expectations for this robot (or Tesla’s robotics program in general). Most roboticists know better than to use humans when setting expectations for humanoid robots, because disappointment is inevitable. And trying to save it at the literal last minute by saying, “compared to not having a robot at all, our robot will be very impressive,” while true, is not going to fix things... (MORE - missing details)

[Yazata]

Admittedly it was slow and shaky. It doesn't dance nearly as well as Boston Dynamics' Atlas. If it toppled over, I doubt if it could get up.

But I think that it's a very good prototype only one year after the project was announced.

I'm impressed that it uses the Tesla automobile computers. Tesla must have realized that their AI technology was applicable to a lot more than cars. Which was what 'AI Day' was all about, I guess.

Elon imagines Tesla as being much more than an automobile company, he sees it potentially as being a general artifical intelligence company.

[Yazata]

And here are the Teslabots seven months later. I believe that this was filmed at what was Tesla's former headquarters in Palo Alto before the HQ moved to outside Austin. Some of the corporate business functions are still in Palo Alto and it seems to be where the Teslabots are spawning.

They are still slow, shaky and clumsy looking.

But where Boston Dynamics' Atlas' moves must be human-choreographed, with the AI as yet limited to animal-like balance and body-movement, the Teslabot is quite different. Its balance and body-movement are still inferior to Boston Dynamics and still need work, but the Teslabot in superior in ways that include autonomy and understanding its environment. That includes machine-vision, the ability to learn about its surroundings and navigate autonomously. Apparently its intelligence is now being applied to accomplishing tasks, which its AI learns in much the same way that Tesla FSD learns to get you from point A to point B without crashing or killing anyone.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/XiQkeWOFwmk

[Yazata]

4 1/2 months after the last post, the Teslabot is continuing to develop its intelligent neural network and its ability to smoothly control its limbs and perform tasks.

https://twitter.com/Tesla_Optimus/status...0693668189

[Yazata]

Tesla held its quarterly financial call today. And Elon made these interesting remarks:

"I should say another cool thing about Optimus is that there's, just in the U.S. alone, there are 2 million amputees. And I was just talking to the Neuralink team, and by combining a Neuralink implant and a robotic arm or leg for someone that has had their arm or leg or arms and legs amputated, we believe we can give basically a cyber body that is incredibly capable. A Six Million Dollar Man in real life. Don’t want to cost $6 million. $60,000 man. This sounds impressive, but it will actually, I think, would be incredible to potentially help people around the world and give them a robot arm, or like, that is as good, maybe long term better than a biological one."

"We can rebuild him; we have the technology!"

The video in the X post below illustrates that the Teslabot's arm already moves in a very human way. Just put the arm in a situation where it isn't being driven by a hard silicon neural net on a computer chip, but rather by a squishy wet neural net inside an amputation victim's skull.

https://twitter.com/Tesla_Optimus/status...0693668189

[Yazata]

The Teslabot continues to improve

https://twitter.com/Tesla_Optimus/status...0137225501

[Yazata]

More bullshit from the media:

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While the story tries to suggest that a Teslabot attacked a human, the accident actually involved a Kuka industrial assembly line robot that got switched on by accident while a technician was working on the line.

While the technician was indeed seriously injured, it isn't exactly new news. The accident happened in 2021.

[Image: s-l1600.jpg]

[Yazata]

Just heard the story of what happened described by a Tesla employee who was there when it happened.

It was an assembly line robot that was being programmed to perform its assembly line task by a Tesla engineer and a manufacturer representative. The robot was supposed to be "locked out" which would prevent it from moving. Apparently the manufacturer rep unlocked it by accident and the robot unexpectedly started to perform its moves, striking and cutting the Tesla guy who was in its way.

So no Optimus robots (Teslabots) were involved. (The accident happened in Austin Texas and the Teslabots are in Palo Alto California.) And no robot "attacked" anyone. It was human error and the robot was just performing its programmed motions with no malevolent intent (or any intent at all).