Why I am optimistic about the Optimus bot

Submitted by Effective-Dig8734 t3_xt7no0 in singularity

Following ai day 2 a lot of people seem to be comparing the robot to things like Boston dynamics, and even a Honda robot 20 years ago. These comparisons are foolish to make for 3 reasons

  1. The Optimus bot is being built for mass production, they plan to make millions of these things so naturally they have to use materials that are easier to obtain. This is different from other robots that are usually built as just a single unit and have hundreds of thousands poured into a single bot.

  2. Optimus will be fully autonomous (except for the need to follow human commands) this is different from other robots because other humanoid robots out there are usually either pre programmed or controlled with some controller. Now you may be asking what’s the difference between using a controller and giving commands. With a controller you cannot give any advanced commands, for example if I wanted the bot to fetch me something from the fridge I could just say get me something from the fridge, with a controller I would need to manually control it to walk 20 steps turn right go down the stairs turn left open fridge etc

  3. They only came up with the concept a year ago and already have a somewhat decent prototype

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KidKilobyte t1_iqoja05 wrote

Before the presentation the conventional wisdom is this would all be hype and no real reveal. Now it is here and while not better than Boston Dynamic it is far better than had been expected. Lots of people are saying other companies have been doing this for 20 years. BUT, those companies didn't just give all their secrets for Tesla to build on. Some is open source I'm sure, but most of this was developed inhouse in a year. The real test will be what a presentation looks like with another year of work. Unlike self-driving cars, it may much easier to see and gauge the amount of progress year to year and whether this is really going to lead to something. As others have mentioned, the real progress not really caught by the general public, is not whether it can walk at all, but how much it has to be pre-programmed and how much it is just learning to do for itself and following commands.

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Midori_Schaaf t1_iqofssf wrote

The reason Optimus is not comparable to other robots is because for those robots, their behavior is preprogrammed. Optimus uses an AI to dynamically respond to environmental stimuli.

That is the game changing technical feat. And tesla has been working on AI for their cars, so they are leaps ahead of most companies that may try to compete.

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manOnPavementWaving t1_iqohe5w wrote

Except of course for all the companies that have also been doing this. Saycan (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.01691) actually manages to perform arbitrary tasks with very decent performance, more transparent research (not in open sourcing, but definitely in explaining their method) and google has much more experience with AI (not that it matters much).

Optimus could become very cool, but Tesla decidedly hasnt got an edge in this space

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Lone-Pine t1_iquqkcj wrote

What exactly can Saycan do? All I've seen it do is deliver a sponge and misplace an empty coke can.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqojm71 wrote

Tesla most certainly does have an edge in this space at least when it comes to ai navigating the real world

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Talkat t1_iqos2n2 wrote

They have massive edges:

  1. AI: leaders in the model, their training setup, their data aquisition, and their own hardware

  2. Manufacturing: a world leader in advanced manufacturing with multiple massive factories incljding products like motors, batteries and castings.. all things helpful for robots

  3. Org Structure: this might seem like a small one, but I don't think you should underestimate the structure of musk companies. It enables rapid innovation and can scale.

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salaryboy t1_iqpsgco wrote

Exactly. There are several dozen companies that could achieve #1 (most major tech companies, soon to include midsize) and a few that can do #2 (mostly car companies). Tesla has both, which may be almost unique outside of perhaps Amazon (their acquired robotics tech is highly advanced, but not nearly to Tesla's scale).

This won't be fast, but if they have the will to do it the tech may be doable in 4-6 years. If it starts to take off, expect to see collabs between Microsoft and Ford or Google, Boston Dynamics, and GM to build similar.

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ArgentStonecutter t1_iqp00wx wrote

Tesla is notorious for manufacturing quality issues and just generally winging it.

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Talkat t1_iqpjjp8 wrote

Compare the growth in their manufacturing capacity. From 50k cars to 5m in ten years. That's 100x.

If your growing that fast of course your going to run into issues. But the bigger take away is that they can grow that fast and I can't think of another company with that level of performance

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CleanThroughMyJorts t1_iqqg1ds wrote

No, based on what Musk was describing, I really thought they'd go the route of LLM conditioned robots like what Google is doing which would be more general, but their tech stack looks to be going very much in the "preprogrammed" direction

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-ZeroRelevance- t1_iquh9w1 wrote

I didn’t really get the impression that they were going for a pre-programmed approach. If I remember correctly, the three systems they showed regarding controlling the robot were:

  1. The vision system, which used cameras to build a voxel-based rendering of the world around it, based on a computer-vision ML model
  2. The movement system, which they said they trained using simulations iirc
  3. The interaction systems, which they trained using body-tracked recordings of people doing ordinary factory work

All three of these systems used machine learning and were not pre-programmed. The closest thing to pre-programmed that I can think of is the hard-coded emergency commands, but I doubt you were talking about them.

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CleanThroughMyJorts t1_iquymsb wrote

Yes "preprogrammed" definitely is the wrong word here on my part. I'm talking about narrow AI Vs more general AI.

With Optimus, it looks like for each task it has to do must be explicitly preprogrammed. Eg user command: "pick up that ball", it needs to have an explicit navigation task it's trained on, and explicit "grabbing" tasks which then need to be composed by hand and preprogrammed into a routine for retrieving an object. This is as opposed to projects like Google's SayCan where the language of interpreting the task, and the compositionality of prior skills learned to synthesize a policy for solving a problem are all learned.

To me this puts Optimus much closer to Atlas than it does the vision that Musk described last year for robots that can handle highly unstructured environments and custom user tasks

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-ZeroRelevance- t1_iquyxvs wrote

Yeah, fair enough. Right now, it seems like it’s mostly aimed at factory use, so it’s not too important, but they’ll definitely need to think about implementing that in the near future. I imagine it will be pretty trivial to release a SayCan-like system by the planned release date though, so it’s probably not a huge concern.

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TinyBurbz t1_iqovhi5 wrote

>And tesla has been working on AI for their cars, so they are leaps ahead of most companies that may try to compete.

Ha ha haha ha ha
Tesla... AHEAD? No, they are just more ballsy.

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DakPara t1_iqp11iy wrote

I was impressed by their work on actuators. It shows they are starting from first principles. And progress in a year was decent IMO.

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overlordpotatoe t1_iqp8up6 wrote

I just hope that by the time I'm old, I can have a robot butler. Imagine living with a friendly robot that keeps your house clean and cooks you delicious, healthy meals every day.

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athosneon t1_iqoef16 wrote

Those aren’t reasons but hopeful speculation. As for point 3 what are you talking about???

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_in_literature

I agree with the sentiment that any progress is good progress.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqon95w wrote

I should have been more specific, they only came up with the concept of Optimus not autonomous robots. Which means development and planning has only been happening for a year or so

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CremeEmotional6561 t1_iqpdf0g wrote

>1. The Optimus bot is being built for mass production

1. The Optimus bot is being built for mass pr

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TheSingulatarian t1_iqq3gw9 wrote

This thing needs 5 or more versions to hope to be market ready. I'm not dismissing it out of hand, but probably will not be ready for sale until the end of the decade.

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hucktard t1_iqs0g0f wrote

I agree. But if they can sell a useful humanoid robot for a reasonable price by the end of the decade then that is a huge success. That will be world changing.

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Ebsolas t1_ir3qiiw wrote

The hardware looks good enough for production. The problem is in software. Software can always improve, especially with over the air updates.

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mli t1_iqpwn6a wrote

at this point it's just promiseware, wake me up when it does something like ironing clothes or cook's a meal, then im impressed.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqpwz7e wrote

It’s obvious to everyone that you just have a prejudice towards Elon or Tesla as a whole, you understand this is there product right? If they say that this is what the robot is going to do/cost then it should be assumed that that is what it will do/cost. If it turns out that it won’t do/cost the things/amounts they say it will, then that’s called a letdown, but assuming a letdown is pretty unreasonable.

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darklinux1977 t1_iqop9ag wrote

For me, if it makes it to production, to delivery and to be used by the customer, it will be as important as the GPU in machine learning: making power cheap.

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SmileEverySecond t1_iqptmsz wrote

Yall seriously need to do more researches/watch videos about robotics products & current states around the world lmao.

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BbxTx t1_iqqji8a wrote

I think that once they get a good development body they can enter the physical characteristics into a computer. They can then simulate and use artificial intelligence to rapidly develop the robot. I’m sure they probably did this already but I think that by next year there will be a huge difference. A big milestone will be when the robot can observe a teacher and learn a task.

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chimgchomg t1_iqq19uq wrote

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?

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tms102 t1_iqqfgz3 wrote

>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.

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i_wayyy_over_think t1_iqqvqht wrote

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

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chimgchomg t1_iqqx0hj wrote

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.

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i_wayyy_over_think t1_iqqz0sc wrote

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.

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limbozo t1_iqq6c6w wrote

It's not meant to work, it's just a marketing stunt. Elon needs huge amounts of capital investment in order to continue building spaceX and so every few years he'll whack out another science fiction company to woo investors (and his adoring fans on reddit) in order to create the illusion that he's some kind of Tony Stark and investors don't get fed up of the lack of returns and continue to keep his companies liquid.

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tms102 t1_iqqf390 wrote

Seems like you only saw a clip of the robot and didn't listen to the presentation at all or didn't understand any of it.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqs25sl wrote

Dude what are you talking about, Tesla is the company making Optimus not spacex

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limbozo t1_iqvtlfz wrote

Very astute point u/Effective-Dig8734, but not quite the gotcha moment you might think. He's the CEO of both companies. If you think that Musk's personal brand has no bearing on investment in his companies, then I don't know what to tell you.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqvtuaj wrote

You said Elon needs huge capital investment to build spacex, but Tesla is the one producing optimus. Although your point can’t be proven either way because you have no evidence

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bindingofme t1_iqs3wkq wrote

I don’t get why people are optimistic about an EXTREMELY early prototype from a company that has made outlandish promises about products in multiple industries (cybertruck, boring co, self driving ai) that it has repeatedly failed to meet deadlines/promises with. The easy part is making a convention prototype that just walks around in a controlled environment. It is so far from anything worth being optimistic about, especially compared to other industry leaders, in addition to coming from a company that has historically been disingenuous at best about multiple industries. “But it’s only after a year!” Yeah most companies work on things internally for many years before going public, it’s incredibly naive to imagine this presentation was anything but a ploy for investment given the current state of the product vs the promised end use.

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Effective-Dig8734 OP t1_iqs4kr8 wrote

I don’t understand your prejudice but I guess it makes sense considering you don’t seem to be very knowledgeable on the subject, tbh idc what Elon says I’m looking at it and taking it in for what it is not what Elon says it will be. The prototype isn’t very special but the underlying technology is very interesting and because of this underlying tech this robot has a lot of future application of the robot is continued to be developed. Can you tell me what industry leaders you’re talking about?

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Optimism4Days t1_iqumm1z wrote

Here is how Teslabot can utterly blown the world's mind:

Train Teslabot using a human "VR Driver" a user wearing headset sees through Optimus eyes and controls its actions. Imagine if Optimus had approached someone in the audience, took their cellphone and took a selfie with the person. THE INTERNET WOULD BE IN FULL MELTDOWN. Then imagine that Optimus walked over to a counter and, say, brewed a cup of coffee for Elon.

Because the movements are real, coming from the Driver, they would appear completely natural. In fact the Driver could be walking a 1to1 space from behind the stage: sensors on the Drivers hands and feet.

And here's the thing: if a VR Driver performs a task enough times as Optimus, Optimus AI would be able to extrapolate the ground truth of the task and do it autonomously. Imagine thousands of people modeling tasks through Optimus, and each task uploading to the Optimus cloud: exponential learning. One person teaches Optimus to dance, another to use a screwdriver, another to climb ladders, etc... etc...

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Equivalent-Ice-7274 t1_ira586z wrote

By OP saying the millions of robots WILL be fully autonomous is not yet based in reality. We can’t even make one robot act with full autonomy even if it had access to the entire processing power of the largest supercomputers. Will each robot need to have access to a billion dollar supercomputer? We don’t know.

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