Are You Ready For Tesla’s Robot Humanoid Invasion?

Whatever you think of Elon Musk, you can’t deny that his car company Tesla has been the leading force behind the switch to electrification. Now Tesla is hoping to start another revolution. Musk teased a humanoid robot at the last AI Day, and this year, he is expected to show off a working prototype. The day was pushed back from August to the end of this month, purportedly to enable an operational demo. Should we all be readying ourselves for the Rise of the Machines?

Originally called the Tesla Bot and now playfully renamed Optimus (after the Transformers Autobots character), the new bipedal being will (potentially) be marching onstage at the next Tesla AI Day on 30^th September. Few details have emerged since the initial announcement last year, though. Optimus is expected to be 5 foot 8 inches (1.73m) tall, humanoid in appearance, and 125lbs (57kg) in weight. It will be able to walk at 5mph, not run, so you can easily get away from it. But it will have great carrying capacity, being able to deadlift 150lbs (68kg) and carry 45lbs (20kg). So it will be able to lift a child or small adult, and carry your shopping. But it won’t be throwing you through your front window, Terminator style.

Musk has high hopes for Optimus. He suggests that it could do the cooking, mow lawns, care for the elderly and – yes – perform duties as a sexual partner. The last one is probably tongue-in-cheek (or maybe somewhere else, but let’s not go there). Nevertheless, he doesn’t see Optimus as replacing human beings, describing the robot as “friendly”. It is intended to do the jobs we don’t want to do. We will have to wait until the AI Day to learn more, though. When BuzzFeed tried to find out how far development had progressed, Musk allegedly said he hated BuzzFeed “with the passion of a thousand suns”. Unsurprisingly, the publication didn’t learn anything new.

Optimus won’t be the only exciting thing to be announced at AI Day in a week’s time. In fact, it probably won’t be the most important thing. Despite considerable criticism and concern, Tesla’s Full Self Driving beta continues apace, and AI Day will mark a huge update, some details of which have started to filter through. Version 10.69.3 will be able to navigate across tighter gaps in traffic, thanks to improvement in the neural net’s velocity predictions for crossing traffic, according to a Tweet by Musk. There is also some evidence that FSD will now signal before changing lanes, as it really should for safety. It will match speed to traffic more proactively.

There is likely to be a lot more than this. We can hope there will also be an update on how the Dojo supercomputer is developing. This is a specialized “Exaflop” machine focused specifically on crunching the data collected during autonomous driving trials to build better models. It’s a radical design on many levels, too technical to go into here, but we haven’t heard much about it since the AI Day 2021 announcement. Theoretically, it will unleash an ability to iterate FSD versions like never before, and potentially be able to perform the kind of processing needed to make an autonomous humanoid robot a reality too.

Whatever Musk shows off next week, it’s sure to be a spectacle but also, as always, will need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Musk has delivered some incredible, game-changing technologies, from Tesla to SpaceX. But he has also overpromised and underdelivered frequently as well. It’s right to be skeptical about when, or if, Musk will actually deliver Optimus, or anything announced at AI Day. At the Autonomy event in 2019, Musk promised a million robotaxis by 2020, and although the FSD Beta started in October of that year, no Tesla cars are yet operating as autonomous hire vehicles and only a little over 160,000 people are on the beta so far, after 60,000 more were added to the program this month, thanks to a reduction on the required safety score from 90 to 80. Yet at the last AI Day in 2021, Musk promised a million users by the end of 2022. So the robotaxi dream is still some years away.

Musk has said that Optimus production will start next year. Judging by how much longer than expected FSD is taking to become a reality, don’t hold your breath. But AI Day 2022 is likely to be a fun show with Optimus at its center – perhaps twerking alongside Musk himself. Even if Optimus is just there to make headlines and is much further off than Musk promises, he may well deliver a revolution in consumer robotics eventually. After all, as critical as people quite rightly are of FSD, it’s the largest live trial of autonomous vehicles anywhere in the world. With the largest AI supercomputer as well, Tesla could still be the first company to create a robot car invasion, even if the robot humanoid invasion is going to be further in the future.

The proceedings of AI Day 2022 will be streamed live from the Tesla YouTube channel and on Tesla’s website.