Like the Robotaxi, Tesla's Optimis robot is also not ready for prime time.
Driverless taxis roam the streets of my hometown now, and none of them are Teslas. There are also robotic novelty bars in many tourist-heavy locations, and none of them use Tesla Optimis robots. I realize I am not playing 11-dimensional chess, but faking demos of products that other people already have in the field seems like a low-percentage choice for success.
Robert Scoble, an AI enthusiast in attendance at the event, posted a video to Twitter of Optimus pouring drinks and waving to attendees. A second video, in which Scoble has a conversation with the bot's operator and directly addresses the question of whether Optimus did anything autonomously at the party. The answer appears to be a resounding no.
The fact that Optimus could carry on a conversation, alone, is a sign that the bot was primarily being remote controlled. The voice responding to Scoble's questions, seemingly coming from some onboard speaker, doesn't sound AI-generated — it's clearly a human operator somewhere behind the scenes. The response itself, saying that there might be some AI involved, is not the kind of answer given by a company happily showing off its latest advancements in artificial intelligence. That's the kind of thing you say when you're trying to pretend like you're using any AI at all.
Jalopnik
It begs the question of how much full self-driving the CyberCab did. Tesla's automation appears to be an army of mechanical Turks.
Previously:
• Amazon's Mechanical Turk used increasingly for spam
