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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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