[RyanOD]

I second this. Is there anyone who actually believes Optimus is going to be a success and has any sort of data to back that up?

I'm not in robotics, but I look at humanoid robots and, while incredible examples of engineering know-how, they seem to be a long way from useful in commercial applications. Am I jhust ignorant of their true value? Seems like all I ever see them doing is parkour.

[londons_explore]

Optimus could do really well if they had all the smartest robotics engineers working on it...

But it seems that ~80% of the smart people I know refuse to work for Musk on principle, and the remaining 20% prefer to work somewhere that pays well (Musk companies do not).

End result is he has a team of mediocre engineers working on it which is why their demos appear years behind some competitors like Boston dynamics and Unitree.

I think the same is happening to Tesla cars (not much innovation in the last few years).

[Gud]

I mean, it well be true that Tesla and SpaceX are populated by mediocre engineers.

I doubt it, considering their accomplishments.

[jandrese]

Elon's hype level over Optimus practically off the charts. He has profit projections that have Optimus be effectively all of GDP in the future. Say what you want about Elon, but he does put his money where his mouth is and I believe he will try to manufacture robots. Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.

Optimus is also a bit of a "squirrel!" for the market that he likes to talk about whenever sales figures at Tesla start flagging. Meme stocks only work as long as people still believe in infinite exponential growth.

[zardo]

> Also, the S and X models are old and their market segment is heavily saturated at this point so it makes sense for Tesla to exit those model lines.

Car companies typically invest in new models in the same segment in order to stay competitive with the other car companies.

[JKCalhoun]

Is there any evidence there is any kind of market a humanoid robot at all?

(Regardless, from what I've seen, the Chinese will own this segment too.)

[spprashant]

Right. How many people actually want a remotely monitored robot collecting personal data, that will likely also require a hefty monthly subscription?

[ben_w]

> I second this. Is there anyone who actually believes Optimus is going to be a success and has any sort of data to back that up?

If there was no competition (there is), and he met the price envelope he's talking about (Cybertruck suggests he won't), I can buy the idea that there's a market opportunity for a few tens of millions of humanoid robots which are even just 5% AI and 95% remote workers in VR headsets, just because this means you can get cheap 3rd-world wages running your "made in America*" factories.

But there is competition, and I don't think he'll meet his price target.

As for the AI: even when I forecast under the assumption of continued improvements of hardware and software, I see at least a ten year gap between any given level of self-driving car and a humanoid robot small enough and light enough to get into the driver's seat of a normal car and drive it to the same standard, and that's just for driving a car, not all the other things people like to imagine in a world where androids are good enough to generically replace human labour.

* insert any other nation as desired, it works in any place where wages are higher than the cheapest nation with reliable internet (modulo the TCO of the robot, which nobody knows yet).

This will lead to minds getting blown as all those "foreigners coming here and taking our jobs" whose deportation people demand, are now "working from home in a different country and still taking our jobs" and the US in particular will have to wrangle with how this is a first amendment issue because remote control is just speech isn't it?

And when we consider how the current AI boom seems to have come with a total lack of even the most basic security considerations in their usage, these robots, wether** AI or remote controlled, are absolutely going to get turned into Mr-Stabby-the-totally-deniable-assassin.

** pun not intended, but when I noticed the misspelling I decided the implications still worked as a joke.

[SR2Z]

There is some value in producing a lot of solid hardware, but nowhere even close to Tesla's absurd valuation.

I think they are perfectly capable of writing software to drive the robot - if Musk doesn't stick his head in like he did with LIDAR/FSD and impose some stupid requirement that handicaps the product.

[jandrese]

But the whole shtick with Optimus is that they aren't writing software. It's supposed to be all LLM training so when you buy your robot you can give it orders like "do the dishes", "clean the gutters", "dig a backyard pool for me", or "build me another Optimus" and you can go off to do whatever while it completes the task.

Elon thinks it would be too expensive to have to write code for every task you might ask one of these to do, they want it to be fully autonomous.

Their engineers aren't behind keyboards typing C++, they're wearing VR headsets and feeding the data to a LLM, although even that is probably too specific for Elon's long term plans. Obviously he doesn't want to have to have people repeat actions hundreds of times before the dumb robots figure it out. Especially for "simple" tasks like serving drinks at press events.

[techblueberry]

But how would we evaluate "perfectly capable" without evidence, there's just been no evidence they've done anything so far right? Am I missing something? I guess looking closer it was only announced four years ago. But it seems like it's only been smoke and mirrors so far.