chimgchomg t1_iqq19uq wrote on October 2, 2022 at 7:19 AM

I'm pessimistic about Optimus because Tesla is spending money on things outside of its expertise when its core business is failing. The cybertruck is years behind schedule, and the semi cant be considered anything but vaporware at this point.

"Oh wow Tesla dojo, so fast." Well guess what, it's also incredibly expensive to design your own computer chips and have them fabricated when you could just buy Nvidia A100s like every other AI development company in industry. Similar issue with their autopilot hardware. Why go through the trouble of designing an entire circuit board and chipset when you can just use a GPU, like everybody else? There is absolutely no guarantee that any of these computer chips will be powerful enough when we finally understand what the level of AI that they aspire to will actually require, in terms of compute. That's why research is still done using general purpose hardware.

People have this attitude of, "oh, Optimus will eventually get there." And maybe it will after years of development. Is that going to happen before Tesla's ponzi scheme stock craters into the ground after neglecting their actual customers for years on end?

tms102 t1_iqqfgz3 wrote on October 2, 2022 at 10:24 AM

>when its core business is failing.

This is a joke post, right?

> Why go through the trouble of designing an entire circuit board and chipset when you can just use a GPU, like everybody else?

You didn't watch the presentation at all did you? They literally answer this question and back it up with data and stats.

i_wayyy_over_think t1_iqqvqht wrote on October 2, 2022 at 1:20 PM

If you do what everyone else does, then you only get mediocre results.

chimgchomg t1_iqqx0hj wrote on October 2, 2022 at 1:31 PM

If you try to do everything by yourself from scratch then you are destined to stretch yourself too thin and fail. It's about specialization. Tesla was highly specialized in the manufacture of electric vehicles and batteries. They eventually branched into solar, which mostly didn't go so well. Now they're branching into chip design, AI, and robotics all at the same time with no prior advantage, and at the cost of their EV business which is not receiving any investment from their giant piles of money to fix quality control and service problems that have plagued them for years.

i_wayyy_over_think t1_iqqz0sc wrote on October 2, 2022 at 1:46 PM

Yeah in general terms we’re both right. Can’t reinvent the wheel on absolutely everything.

Though companies need to explore new areas if they want to keep growing or they’ll go extinct or get disrupted. Like Amazon the book company starting the cloud computing industry. And like google getting into all their several hundreds of different lab projects.

Dojo is the seed to grow into a new business to take on AWS cloud for instance.