I have a decade of experience in robotics (including both humanoid robots and self-driving cars) and I think this is optimistic.
Robotics is a wonderful field if you like to work on hard research problems. It is a terrible field if you're trying to invent a profitable product.
What tesla are conceptually pitching here (let's ignore that they'll deliver something that's pretty useless by comparison to what they're hoping you're assuming they mean) is a not-in-our-lifetimes leap in robotics in multiple ways
The huge task is anyway not to build a robot. The huge part is to make the robot (or any device) smarter than a slice bread.
Your contention is that its power consumption that makes a general purpose humanoid robot impossible?
He probably doesn’t even do it to bump the stock price. It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while. Then they both smoke so much weed they forget the previous never-gonna-happen idea and come up with a brand new one.
> Remember the Cybertruck?
Cybertruck is literally not vapoware. It was never even supposed to come out before the end of this year. Technically they are not even late yet. Now they have pushed it back into 2022 but that is a few month delay is really not a that big a deal for a truck product with a new architecture based on a new factory.
The way you talk is as if the Cybertruck was supposed to be out last year and was delayed to 2025.
Literally every indication is that this will be a very successful product for Tesla. It being a few month, or half a year late is really not that big deal for a engineering and manufacturing project of that scale.
> Or how he said he could control pigs by putting microchips in their brains?
That was never what they actually said. Why the need to just make up stuff? And again, the never claimed this was a product anybody can just go out and buy within a year or so.
Neurolink the company is still working on that and literally nobody expected them to have a product yet.
Why do you feel the need to shit on the engineers that work on this just because you have some issue with Musk? The companies first goal is to make a product the help people with different deceases and disabilities. Do you get equally dismissive of all medical companies that don't have a product in the market after a few years of fundamental research?
So just because you have made up a wild story about Neurolink being about controlling sheep and you don't remember seeing a video of a remote controlled sheep on twitter you conclude that it is all bullshit.
> It’s probably just about doing whatever will impress Grimes for a little while.
This sort of psychoanalysis is literally the lowest form of comment you can find on Hacker News. You should be ashamed of yourself.
> Then they both smoke so much weed they forget the previous never-gonna-happen idea and come up with a brand new one.
Yeah because a Musk company has never actually done what they said they would. Literally all Musk does is make up stuff and that is why his companies constantly fail and never produce any product.
No matter SpaceX will launch 50-80% of total payload to Orbit this year. No matter that SpaceX produced the best rocket engine in human history. No matter SpaceX is universally accepted as the globally dominate space company. They control more satellites then all other government and companies combined.
No matter that Tesla is universally acknowledged as the global leader in BEV, auto-selling the second best most prolific BEV company by 2x and volume and far more then that in revenue. No matter they produced the fastest production car in human history. No matter that they literally designed a new battery and battery factory from the ground up.
No matter that both company are growing widely fast and Tesla being very profitable. SpaceX was very profitable but huge investment in Starship and Starlink likely make it unprofitable right now, but the unit economics are still great on their core business.
But of course, these are clear signs that all he does is sit around and get high and comes up with ideas to impress his girlfriend. Honestly, I can not even imagine what level of dislike or jealousy somebody must have to be so dismissive of somebody else.
If you want to call him a social inept asshole that is fine, but your argument simply doesn't hold water.
You missed the opportunity to say "globally accepted as the universally dominate space company"
And I notice you gave me a 6,000-word rant in response to my post, yet you dropped that whole Bitcoin thing as if I hadn't even said it.
Specially a person with the history of having the exact follow-through you criticize him for. Have you literally not been around for the last 2 decades?
Funny that this person that you have diagnosed drug addiction is widely more successful then you are.
I think flipping a giant rocket on its way back down to have it land upright sounded just as nutty as this awhile back, let alone a startup competing (successfully) against the military industrial complex.
The entire car industry is also adopting electric. No, I think Musk has enough notable wins to get a pass here.
It seems as though a lot of people (not the GP) really want to be apart of the narrative change on Musk, whatever humanity’s obsession is with building up and then destroying someone, followed with the redemption story.
He really doesn’t have to prove anything anymore in my book.
Flipping that rocket and getting NASA contracts to go actually do it against Boeing/Lockheed/etc is not a toy problem.
I don’t want to say it would never have happened without Spacex, but probably it would not have happened in our lifetime.
Human-level robotics, on the other hand, is not a problem of missing incentive. For all I know about the field (as a casual observer), we are still several breakthroughs away from achieving this goal.
We have actuators, sensors, and computers to build humanoid robots, isn’t it “just” a software problem like flipping rockets was?
There's a difference between not being able to do something, and not having a reason to.
Enough.
And herein lies the problem: landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty. Because of this feat, "Elon can do anything!"
The reason we don't land rockets is half technical, half economic.
The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.
Are people angry that Musk said he will have a prototype in a 18 month? Are they angry because he dared even mention wanting to work on that problem.
> landing the rocket is really cool, but normal people overestimate the difficulty.
Building the biggest rocket in the world, building new engines that are better then any invented in human history, coming up with a complete new way of reentering and doing a never before done landing maneuver and doing that from a space port that was basically a swamp only 1.5 years earlier is quite different then 'landing a rocket'.
Of course it doesn't mean he can magically do anything but his companies have enough engineering credit between them that when they announce to put serious resources behind something we should at least not dismiss them out of hand.
The have fully vertically integrated AI, power electronics, manufacturing robots and batteries both design, testing&validation and manufacturing facilities. Not to mention lots of capital and a CEO who clearly is supportive of the project if its gone make short term money or not.
I for one am interested to see where this is in 2-3 years.
> The list of things Elon has said they will achieve, and have not, far exceeds the list of exceptional tech his companies have produced.
Questionable. If you give an product announcement a 3-4 year lead time for development and commercialization. When you go back over the existence Musk companies, I would suggest that most has actually happened.
Sure they didn't do Red Dragon, propulsive Dragon landing, Roadster and Semi is not out yet FSD clearly didn't go as he hopped. I guess we could come up with some other abandoned and delayed projects. I guess they just delayed Cybertruck for a few more month but that is hardly noteworthy in the automotive industry.
The Starship projects is still remarkably close to the timeline from 2016 (that was considered beyond delusional by industry experts), Raptor and Vacuum Raptor outperform what was announced, Starlink are regularly launching and they are mass producing phase array antennas. Falcon 9 platform reached the 10 relights that was the initial target. The have managed to deliver humans to Station and bring them back (years before the competitor who will get 2 extra billion will be able to).
Tesla despite people clowning Musk about how dumb he is about manufacturing has scaled manufacturing as fast as almost no other manufacturing company ever has and there is no end in sight (new factories coming online as soon as this end of this year). Not to mention that they have achieved industry leading unit margins on that production. They are by far the largest produces of BEVs in the world by volume and by a even larger amount by revenue. They are producing Plaid power train cars and have made the fastest production car in history.
They are in the final stretch of having completed a re-design and re-engineering of a battery manufacturing line and battery. They did this almost fully vertically integrated building much of their own manufacturing equipment. This project alone is a gigantic engineering effort of a scale that is hard to really grasp. The end of this year is very likely when the first actual cars with these batteries will be sold.
I think FSD is by far their most visible and most relevant failure and by far the most talked about on HN, but overall I think its hard to point to any companies that did better in terms of technology development last decade (specially considering that when the decade started these companies were tiny).
Other aspirational goals he has set include a colony of a million people on Mars and a neural lace. I think a humanoid robot is less ambitious than either of these two.
On the other hand we just do not have the technology for a full humanoid robot, neither now nor the near future. An AI that can do mundane tasks like ironing and folding clothes is way beyond our grasp, and then there are the issue of limbs and power too.
Not for live humans we don't. The record for landing on Mars is around 1 ton for >$1B, this is too little for a crew cabin and ignores the life support requirement for months spend in space.
IDK, man, life support systems for such a long trip are much more demanding than for a jaunt to Moon and back.
Except Musk says they'll be in beta in 2022. Hah.
Crappy beta can be done quickly and can lead to other things.
But "useful humanoid robot" is way more forward-looking than anything else he's done this with; the closest thing would be the whole "full self-driving without LIDAR" thing, which keeps getting pushed back and is likely not possible with current technology. And building a humanoid robot that can actually do stuff is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than that.
If I had to make a bet on when it was possible, I'd say 25 years. Maybe 10 if Tesla goes all-in on robots and spends tens of billions on it, Manhattan project style.