Last month, on a Very strange investor call, Elon Musk declared that Tesla was no longer a car company. It is a Robotics company now, a AI companies, and cars are just a means to that end. How is it all? Robotics thing go? Well, very slowly, according to a new video from the Optimus team.
Tesla has released a new video on the official Optimus Twitter account – which is deeply strangely consistently written from the point of view of the robot itself – that shows Optimus moving cylinders and weaving through you suspiciously empty Office environment. None of these actions are carried out with a sense of urgency, which begs the question: Is a humanoid robot really the best way to complete these tasks?
Sure, in a vacuum, the idea of a humanoid robot makes sense: it can easily be inserted into existing factories to replace those pesky human workers on a one-to-one basis. However, look at the actual tasks Optimus performs and it’s easy to imagine: specific ass machine this makes the same thing faster and more efficient.
In the exercise of moving the cylinder – likely a substitute for moving battery cells – the end of this small conveyor belt could easily throw objects into its red casing. Since the casing appears to have its slots at regular intervals, it would not be difficult to mount a machine at the bottom to move it in precise timing with the conveyor belt above, ensuring that each new cylinder falls into a new, open hole . I’m no engineer, but these kinds of repeatable tasks seem ripe for a machine that can do one thing well.
A specialized machine would of course have the advantage of true automation – unlike Optimus, which still appears to be controlled by black-clad Tesla employees in VR headsets. It’s quick, but the Tesla video shows these workers controlling connected Optimus bots. Tesla says in the video that they are merely training the robots, but that just brings us back to an inefficient robot form that is molded to perform a single specific task.
But these special machines are of course not marketable. Musk said in the same investor call that he sees no limit to the market for bipedal robots – that buyers will spend endless amounts of money to acquire Optimus bots that can do any task imaginable. However, it remains to be seen whether Optimus can handle it real The task Musk has set himself is to finally justify Tesla’s valuation.