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The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise

Wes DavisOct 14, 2024 at 1:55 AM GMT+8

An Optimus robot at the We, Robot event.

Screenshot: Tesla We, Robot livestreamnormal

Tesla made sure its Optimus robots were a big part of its extravagant, in-person Cybercab reveal last week. The robots mingled with the crowd, served drinks to and played games with guests, and danced inside a gazebo. Seemingly most surprisingly, they could even talk. But it was mostly just a show.

It’s obvious when you watch the videos from the event, of course. If Optimus really was a fully autonomous machine that could immediately react to verbal and visual cues while talking, one-on-one, to human beings in a dimly lit crowd, that would be mind-blowing. 

Attendee Robert Scoble posted that he’d learned humans were “remote assisting” the robots, later clarifying that an engineer had told him the robots used AI to walk, spotted Electrek. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote that the robots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention)” in a note, the outlet reports. 

There are obvious tells to back those claims up, like the fact that the robots all have different voices or that their responses were immediate, with gesticulation to match. 

It doesn’t feel like Tesla was going out of its way to make anyone think the Optimus machines were acting on their own. In another video that Jalopnik pointed to, an Optimus’ voice jokingly told Scoble that “it might be some” when he asked it how much it was controlled by AI.

Another robot — or the human voicing it — told an attendee in a stilted impression of a synthetic voice, “Today, I am assisted by a human,” adding that it’s not fully autonomous. (The voice stumbled on the word “autonomous.”)

Musk first announced Tesla’s humanoid robot by bringing what was very clearly a person in a robot suit on stage, so it’s no surprise that the Optimuses (Optimi? Optimodes?) at last week’s event were hyperbolic in their presentation. And people who went didn’t seem to feel upset or betrayed by that. But if you were hoping to have any sense of how far along Tesla truly is in its humanoid robotics work, the “We, Robot” event wasn’t the place to look.