Tesla’s big autonomy event last night was mainly focused around the two-seat Cybercab and art deco city bus Robovan, but the company also talked about some updates to Optimus — the painfully slow robot that Elon Musk hopes will be an infinite money glitch for the company. The event’s afterparty heavily featured Optimus as a bartender and dancer, but it turns out the bot wasn’t doing anything itself. Tesla employees were remote controlling it the whole time.
Robert Scoble, an AI enthusiast in attendance at the event, posted a video to Twitter of Optimus pouring drinks and waving to attendees. A second video, in which Scoble has a conversation with the bot’s operator and directly addresses the question of whether Optimus did anything autonomously at the party. The answer appears to be a resounding no.
The fact that Optimus could carry on a conversation, alone, is a sign that the bot was primarily being remote controlled. The voice responding to Scoble’s questions, seemingly coming from some onboard speaker, doesn’t sound AI-generated — it’s clearly a human operator somewhere behind the scenes. The response itself, saying that there might be some AI involved, is not the kind of answer given by a company happily showing off its latest advancements in artificial intelligence. That’s the kind of thing you say when you’re trying to pretend like you’re using any AI at all.
This robot, which so far seems to primarily operate by human remote control, remains Elon Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla as a company. Since Musk’s investor call admission that he sees no limit to the amount of money people will spend on robots, Optimus has been his baby — far more so than any of the eugenicist’s actual human children. Maybe he thinks the robots will love him no matter how little care he gives them.