[Music]
so tesla just announced a whole
human-sized
human-shaped
sentient robot this is not a drill this
is a thing that really just happened
and a lot of things come to mind when
hearing that
so
let's get into it now the two things
that might have come to your mind when
hearing that like me are number one why
tesla of all companies
and number two
why a robot human of all things
but if you frame it a certain way it
actually can make a lot of sense but you
got to break a few things down first to
get there so let's get there so tesla
tesla is a car company mostly you know
i've reviewed their cars we've seen
their announcements they're factories
maybe we'll call it a vehicle company
they have a truck they have a bunch of
other stuff but they have a factory that
makes cars so they're a car company but
only like by that specific definition
it's actually pretty common to look at
tesla as a software company uh just
because their software advantage and all
the things that they do with the
software in their cars
is so important to them it's like
they're a software company that happens
to make electric cars
and so when you compare to the mercedes
of the world or the audis of the world
or bmws i would never describe those
companies as software companies
but for tesla that's where their main
advantages and so part of this software
thing that they're doing is this
self-driving
project okay now aside from all the
massive missed time windows and
over-optimistic promises and deadlines
and things like that their self-driving
is currently as it is today some of the
most advanced in the world and it's not
because of high resolution mapping or
predetermined routes it's because teslas
are using their sensors and or mostly
cameras at this point and constantly
scanning their environments and making
thousands of little on-the-fly decisions
in real time
and then all of the miles driven with
this autopilot in action
is used to upload the data back to their
servers and train the whole rest of the
fleet so it's this whole this whole
system is a constantly self-improving
thing the bigger it gets the faster it
can continue to get better so this
requires a lot of computing a lot of
horsepower to be frank and a lot of
smart code
and that's what tesla's been really good
at so tesla had their ai day a couple
days ago you might not have heard about
it but they do this every year they live
stream a bunch of talks from tesla
engineers about computer vision and how
their neural networks have evolved over
time and explaining their focus on
making autonomous cars that rely on
computer vision and their synthetic
visual cortex it's really great lots of
informative complex stuff and at this
year's they unveiled their new custom d1
chip which is this chip that's designed
and built entirely in-house by a car
company which is specifically made to
train tesla's full self-driving
algorithms based on driving footage even
faster and they're basically going to be
replacing all of their gpus they're
currently using to make this super
computer designed to do computer vision
machine learning it's big stuff and so
at some point during all of this
elon's on stage talking and he says
something
about to the effect of tesla is
basically a robotics company uh tesla is
arguably the world's biggest robotics
company because our cars are
like
semi-sentient robots on wheels and if
you think about it
it's like okay yeah i could i could see
that i mean obviously tesla tesla builds
cars so we'll call them a car company
still but like
if it's tesla's ai day and they're
giving a presentation and they're trying
to make as good of a show as possible
for recruiting purposes they're going to
call it
robots so they happen to make robots
that are on wheels but yeah that's
that's how you can get it to make sense
mentally it's like all right
yeah self-driving cars
is just one application of ai
and computer vision and robotics just to
just to solve that problem so that's
what's happening it's a bunch of sensors
scanning its environment making a bunch
of decisions based on that and then
training future versions of it based on
what happens
that's just what's happening in
self-driving cars so that i can see
making sense then elon right afterward
said this uh it it kind of makes sense
to put that on to a humanoid form he
says it makes sense to make these robots
in a humanoid form
and that is where i disagree so this
is the newly unveiled tesla robot it's
it's called teslabot it's a five foot
eight
125 pound
sleek looking like black and white human
shaped robot with this face mask with a
screen on it it's got hands with you
know full 10 fingers it's got feet but
with no toes it's pretty slow it has a
max speed of 5 miles per hour so that
you can outrun it and then it can lift
things up up to 10 pounds with the arms
extended or it can dead lift 150
lots of cameras and actuators and of
course the full self-driving computer
inside so they're saying it's going to
be easy to overpower or run away from so
that should never be a concern
uh but the main purpose the purpose of
this tesla bot the thing that they kept
saying over and over again on stage
during the presentation and during q as
when they're asked about it they kept
defaulting to it will be able to do
tasks that are repetitive dangerous or
boring so that humans don't have to and
so if you buy if you buy tesla as a
robotics company then
yeah this makes sense it's just another
robot
that will use the sensors to scan its
environment and make a bunch of
decisions and navigate around this world
that it's in
but the thing
that i have to say and this is going to
come with a caveat that i'm of course
not a robotics engineer i'm not an
expert at this but
here's my take
the human form
is very inefficient now don't get me
wrong humans we're pretty great right
we're very accomplished species
and we're very complex and we've done a
lot of things well but
they work as a body so well because
number one our brains are amazing but
number two because we've built this
world around us that we live in mostly
with ergonomics designed for humans
but when it's not designed for humans
like this upright bipedal thing that's
balancing all the time it's not very
efficient we just did a retro tech
episode about this about humanoid robots
so i'll link it below if you haven't
already watched it it's it's a super fun
one but we did a lot of talking with
people and experts about this
and it turns out if you want to make a
robot to take over a task
you typically don't want to build it
like a human you want to build it for a
single task
and make it as efficient as possible at
that one task so pop culture forever has
been obsessed with humanoid robots like
i can't even count all the instances of
humanoid-shaped robots in movies and tv
shows over the years that we found it's
something we've been fascinated with
since the beginning of time there's
endless versions of it but it turns out
the ideal way to make a robot vacuum the
floor for you is not to build a
human-sized shaped robot that pushes
around a vacuum it's to make the robot
the vacuum the vacuum is the robot you
don't want a humanoid robot standing at
the sink washing dishes for you
the dishwasher is the robot like that's
the single purpose-built robot tesla
knows this you don't have a humanoid
shaped robot sitting in your car driving
the car for you the car
is the robot the self-driving car that
drives itself has already been done so
the list of things you would want a
human-shaped robot for
is pretty small because labor is
typically not designed around the human
form
the one example they kept giving over
and over in their ai day presentation
was grocery shopping so they you know
you walk to the grocery store you grab a
cart or a basket and you pick out some
items and put them in the basket i guess
that's
you know you need a bunch of different
peripherals and things to pull that off
and maybe a human-shaped robot would be
fine for that
but there's not a whole lot else i can
think of like even when i picture the
most simple boring tasks
like
making a bed
or
building a table like
when i picture a robot that would be
especially good at that i don't picture
a human-shaped one i picture one that's
super focused and super efficient
maybe i'm just short-sighted but i
remember when i talked with elon at the
factory a couple years ago about all the
things that they do with robots versus
the couple of things left that they
still do with humans he had a really
interesting answer so
some parts of it are
like 80 to 90 automated and then some
parts of it are like uh only 10 to 20 or
what are those what are those parts that
humans do better than
humans are really good at adaptation um
and rapid evolution and like doing
like little like
finicky things like like that um it's
like like trying to connect uh a hose
that's like sort of dangling around i
see and and and you're like the robot's
like gonna find the hose
grab it like then connect it to another
hose at that point it's like really hard
yeah like a person can just go ah
they're done gotcha yeah that makes a
lot of sense yeah and it's like when you
see it it's like wow it's super super
obvious
and then we try to have robots do this
and it's like robots like grabbing the
wrong thing and like stick it over here
and they're like oh the the the hose was
here when the rover thought it was here
and so now it like tries to grab air and
then like smashes into the car
it's like you don't want that we yeah it
was the comedy of ours uh tragedy of
ours so yeah all that all that really
made me think like with as good as tesla
is with self-driving
why would you want a humanoid a
human-shaped robot to try to do things
that humans are already good at how long
is it going to take for that robot to
actually get good at things that humans
are good at and you know what the best
way to answer that would probably be to
look at the most advanced robotics
company that i can think of at the
moment which is boston dynamics so
there's like there's two very different
uh types of humanoid robots that i've
seen exist in this world
on one end it's like the dumb single
purpose thing you see at ces like these
are the barely functional robots you see
that can really do only a few things
decently well they're kind of cheesy
looking they're human shaped for no
reason but they exist
and then on the other end of the
spectrum there's boston dynamics atlas
and man i wish when i was out there i
could have seen atlas in person because
just the dog spot
is already impressive enough like it's
got the sensors it has a basic level of
understanding scanning its environment
and it can be programmed to do dangerous
or boring or repetitive things and go
places that humans wouldn't go and we
say dog because they've called it spot
and it's kind of looks like a dog if you
make it behave the right way sometimes
but really it's just a quadruped any
four-legged animal would do
but atlas on the other hand well
well i haven't necessarily seen it do
anything specifically useful yet
but seeing that five-foot human-shaped
robot navigate the world in crazy ways
is something else i mean i did share a
new video of it uh doing parkour and
elon seemed very impressed but even
after all these years of development and
the history of how much we've seen it
get better atlas is not a robot that's
going to be on sale for people to buy
anytime soon and if you ask them about
it
they'll tell you it's just them
experimenting with their computing in a
new form factor and so at the end of the
day my take
teslabot
probably won't exist anytime soon either
you know i know they said on stage there
would be a prototype maybe next year
i
uh
i kind of doubt that they're gonna
leapfrog boston dynamics in the next two
years but then here's the other thing
even if they do come out with it tesla
right now is training their self-driving
computers with billions and billions of
miles of self-driving happening on the
streets today right so the best way to
get as much data about that as possible
is to have it go out in the real world
and do it it's kind of genius actually
that they're making so many cars and
people are really using it for them but
now they're going to be asking for a
humanoid robot
to go out and navigate the entire rest
of the real world where there's an order
of magnitude more stuff to identify and
react to like i mean on the streets
there's obviously other cars and trucks
and buses and it can identify
motorcycles and bicycles and pedestrians
even and then there's traffic cones and
there's lights and all the rest of the
traffic control devices construction
zones
arrows on the road
it's kind of starting to run out that's
almost it but how well is the tesla bot
going to do when you ask it to go get
bananas from the grocery store
like really like how good could it get
or if you ask it hey uh teslabot go grab
my airpods max from downstairs
is it gonna be able to know that that's
headphones or is it gonna have to have a
model of every new pair of headphones
that ever comes out to be able to
identify which one you're talking about
and all of this training that's you can
see where i'm coming from all this
training has to come from real world
data
which i guess would have to come from
people using tesla pots in their homes
and starting to get this going which
seems a little less likely to me than uh
people getting a self-driving car and
then there's just a whole bunch of other
unknowns about this robot too uh what
other colors will it come in will it
come in matte black how does it charge
will it just sit on a usb port in the
corner of a room every day i don't know
will this ever even go on sale
and i don't know if it's really even
about this robot going on sale as much
as it is just about
honestly it could really just be tesla
exploring their
computer vision in another form factor
just like boston dynamics it's just
about tesla becoming the best
ai and computer vision company that they
possibly can
and this being just one more avenue to
get better at it so there's no good
reason i can think of for
a humanoid robot
to exist out there in people's hands
anyway
but hey
makes a lot of good headlines
it's obviously something we've been
fascinated with forever and will
continue to be for a long time
and it could just be one more form
factor that tesla's exploring
and also one of they ever said no to a
good free pr opportunity so anyway
that's about my thoughts on it i'm super
curious what you guys think if you have
any thoughts on would you want something
like this in your own home do you think
the robot will exist
i'm sure the comment section will be fun
below this one either way thanks for
watching
catch you guys in the next one
peace