Tesla's A.I. Day 2022 Recap

Optimus prime, please come down to Earth

Hey Everyone,

Increasingly I’m enjoying covering and writing about Robotics. Like Quantum computing, it’s really early days, and still a time for dreamers. I think Elon Musk appeals to the Asimov readers in us all, and it’s all fair and good, with more than a grain of salt.

Let’s just say 2022 is still a time for dreaming about robots.

Tesla’s A.I. Days reminds me of Jack Ma. Tesla is not a leader in robotics, but aspires to be.

If you care about Tesla’s goal for robots listen to the event here:

You really do want to cheer for Elon Musk’s weird ambitions. He’s quirky and fun and a really bad liar at this point. Tesla’s prototype for a humanoid robot that people would want to buy “on sale” for $20,000 in 2027, is a bit ridiculous for Musk’s legacy. But given a decade of R&D and $Billions in cash, you never know.

I’ll check back in 2032, but really. It’s hard to cover this with a straight face:

• Tesla has unveiled its Optimus humanoid robot at its AI Day 2022 today and Elon Musk believes Tesla can bring it to market for “less than $20,000”.

• The company showed early prototypes of a humanoid robot and said it’s developing special batteries and actuators for them.

• Musk said he thinks it will be possible for customers to get an Optimus humanoid robot from Tesla in 3 to 5 years.

Given Musk’s usual timelines for things like FSD, this means more like the 8 to 12 year range. So Tesla’s robots at scale may occur sometime in the 2030s.

Some robots just need a little push from human men.

But it’s a brave new world and we need pioneers like Musk, to sell the dream, no matter how ridiculous. No matter how much Elon Musk mumbles and stumbles over the lack of real progress made in this his new pet project, among several others.

The origin story of Tesla Bot

During the last AI Day in August 2021, Musk said Tesla was building a humanoid robot, known as the Tesla Bot or Optimus.

And I’m not joking. The company didn’t have so much as a prototype to show at that time, and instead presented an dancer, dressed in a Tesla Bot spandex unitard on stage.

There were two prototypes unveiled at the event. One could not walk. It’s okay.

The one that could “walk” was apparently doing a stunt new to it. They said the robot was walking around for the first time without any mechanical supports on stage in Palo Alto. I don’t get it.

Musk said, ″We’re going to talk about the advancements in AI for Full Self-Driving, as well as how they apply more generally to real world AI problems like a humanoid robot and even going beyond that. I think there’s some potential that what we’re doing here at Tesla could make a meaningful contribution to AGI [artificial general intelligence].”

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