Submitted by Angry_Grandpa_ t3_xteiqm in singularity
I applaud the effort to built a robot, but Elon often struggles to separate a science project in his mind with reality. This is even more of a disconnect from reality than neuralink. If this were presented as an interesting science project that could one day result in a commercial robot akin to Asimo (which could run circles around the Tesla bot) it would have not been as hard a pill to swallow.
Zuckerberg has his metaverse, Google has their Project Loon and Google Fiber, and Elon Musk has The Boring Company, Neuralink, and now the Tesla Bot to call into his question his Midas touch (although it's hard to top a $44 billion dollar offer to purchase Twitter)
They are so far away from anything close to the claims that Elon is making it makes his prediction of robotaxis that we're all supposed to be driving around look like a conservative estimate. Do you remember when he tried to place a value on a Tesla car based on the robotaxis prediction? $80,000? $100,00? Infinity?
As we've seen from the Darpa challenge creating robots that don't fall on their face is exceedingly difficult. It's far more complex than flat roads with a lot of rules governing the actions of cars -- walking up and down stairs and moving through unpredictable environments is super difficult. This fiasco might explain why Andrej Karpathy left Tesla. One minute the focus is full self-driving and the next minute it's a pie in the sky robot that is a distant dream. I want it to happen -- but it was obvious that this was on the level of a university design team trying to come up with something for a Darpa grand challenge under ridiculous time constraints.
I felt sorry for the design team that had to drag their work in progress onto the world stage.
Elon's lack of focus is really starting to show. He's obviously bored with simply improving the Tesla vehicles and making good on past promises as it relates to full self-driving -- which will once again not happen this year. He just keeps adding more to his plate and upping the ante on ridiculous claims. It's getting hard to take him seriously.
But at least it's amusing.