Tesla’s robots may not be as intelligent as Musk likes to make out
Tesla has long staged splashy events to generate buzz and media coverage of forthcoming — and sometimes aspirational — products. Part revival meeting, part recruiting event, the shows let the faithful see CEO Elon Musk speak, and investors get updates on priorities and progress.
On 30 September, Musk hosted Tesla’s second AI Day in Palo Alto, California, formerly the home to its global headquarters. The invitations promised the latest developments in the company’s artificial intelligence efforts, including:
Full Self-Driving, or FSD, the in-beta system that still needs an attentive human driver minding the wheel at all times; Tesla Bot, aka Optimus, the humanoid that Musk has said will one day take over dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks from humans; and
Dojo, the supercomputer Musk has said Tesla’s FSD team may use to improve the “brains” behind its driving systems, using
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the massive volume of video footage that the company’s cars capture.
The show-stopper of Tesla’s first AI Day, held in August last year, was the humanoid bot that, at that time, was actually human. After engineers gave presentations on the company’s driving-system development, a person in a skin-tight suit and helmet took to the stage to perform a jerky dance and presage an announcement from Musk.
“Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company,” he said, explaining the rationale behind the car maker working on a bot. “Our cars are basically semi-sentient robots on wheels.”
Just how sentient Tesla’s cars actually are is the subject of more than just debate. Days before Musk made those comments, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into whether the company’s Autopilot system was defective, after drivers using it repeatedly collided with vehicles at crash scenes.
Last month, a California man filed a proposed class action suit, claiming the car maker had “deceptively and misleadingly” marketed its driver-assistance systems.
Musk has nonetheless extended access to FSD to about 160,000 owners in the US and Canada. When one of those owners posted videos last month showing the latest beta version struggling with right turns, the CEO told the customer not to complain. When another Twitter fan suggested the world’s richest man might have been having a bad day and should apologise, Musk wrote back no — the owner was in the wrong.
Musk postponed this year’s AI Day to give Tesla time to develop a working Optimus prototype. On its website, the company refers to work on a bipedal humanoid.
Tesla employs more than 20,000 people just at its car plant in Fremont, California. How many of those jobs will be eliminated by bots is far from certain. An attempt to extensively automate the facility when the Model 3 first went into production ended in disaster. The CEO said it was his mistake.
“Humans are underrated,” Musk quipped. Bloomberg/DM168
The goal of the app is to help users to create and maintain a healthy work-life balance. You answer a questionnaire and then the app will recommend music channels based on your personality. They are all scientifically engineered to help you focus on tasks.