Tesla Optimus cannot yet fold laundry autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment soon.
Optimus folds a shirt pic.twitter.com/3F5o3jVLq1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2024
Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won’t require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt)
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2024
Dr Jim Fan is @NVIDIA Senior Research Scientist & Lead of AI Agents. Creating foundation models for Agents, Robotics, Gaming of Nvidia. Jim has a comment on Tesla Optimus.
I appreciate this so much. Optimus has the best Humanoid hardware I’ve seen. The smoothness and speed of the motions are stunning. We can both be excited about the progress (hardware) and stay grounded on the challenges: ChatGPT moment of Robot Foundation Model is not here yet.… https://t.co/xieFB7zq8o
— Jim Fan (@DrJimFan) January 15, 2024
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
What I like most about this is that Optimus simply pulls the shirt out of the pile. The initial orientation of the shirt to make it foldable is as hard as folding the shirt.
I’m hopeful that Tesla can use the experience they gain from video driven AI for self driving in a general manner to train all sorts of real world AI. Chatbots learn from chat, robots learn from video.
What happens when at mid-lifecycle the AI humanoid robot realizes that in a few years his components will be worn out and it will be replaced and that its whole existence has been to fold shirts?
They are using tele-operating training to teach it this skill for multiple reasons and they don’t include an attempt to create a robot butler who will fold shirts or a robot sweatshops replacement. My suppositions:
One is that in addition to demonstrating the hardware capabilities, folding a shirt does inspire people to dream about robot butlers and sweatshop replacements and imagine what else it might be able to do. A mix of hype and hope.
A more important reason is that because of how neural net “AI” work, tasks often cross over so teaching it as many and as varied tasks (or more accurately, getting the training data to teach it said tasks) as possible can help it do other things that don’t immediately seem related just as teaching a child music lessons improves academic performance in non-music related subjects.
seems to be right on the money. learning like humans do but having access to a ton of data that humans simply dont possess. interesting times.