Fiasco: Optimus robots at Tesla’s party turned out to be human

The Verge website was one of the participants of the event. We are robots Tesla last Thursday, October 10, where Elon Musk presented his Cybertaxi robotaxiand also announced what the sales process and product specifications would be. robot optimus.

The publication’s journalist, Wes Davis, collected evidence to expose the robots that marched that day, and also served drinks to the participants.

Marques Brownlee, one of the most influential technology content creators, believes that “either we are faced with the largest demonstration of robotics and LLM (similar language models to ChatGPT or Claude) ever seen, or (Optimus) is primarily driven by humans. There is no middle ground“.

Last night I played charades with the Tesla Optimus robot. This is either the greatest demonstration of robotics and LLM the world has ever seen, or it IS controlled by a human remotely. Not in the middle. pic.twitter.com/vCqzk8DDdO

— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) October 12, 2024

Assistant Robert Scoble said he learned that people were “remotely assisting” the robots, and later explained that an engineer told him the robots use artificial intelligence to walk. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas wrote in a note that the robots “rely on teleoperation (human intervention),” the publication reported.

“There are obvious signs to support these claims, such as the fact that all robots They have different voices or that his responses were immediate, with appropriate gesticulation,” Davis said in his timeline.

I talked to the engineer.

As he walked, Optimus was controlled by an AI.

It’s really impressive that they brought out so many people in droves. @Teslaevent. https://t.co/CtmCKPrL4T

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) October 11, 2024

I asked. pic.twitter.com/FkgPrdRlyW

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) October 11, 2024

Davis also noted a detail from that night’s video: The other robot, or human voice, told the assistant in a tense synthetic voice, “I’m getting help from a human today,” adding that it wasn’t entirely autonomous. . (The voice faltered on the word “autonomous.”)