Tesla's Optimus Robot Just Rocketed Us Into a Future We Used to Only Imagine
Who had a walking, talking, present-day version of C-3PO on their 2024 bingo card?
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When I was a kid, I was obsessed with robots. So much so that for an entire year, maybe even longer, I was convinced that I was a robot.
I don’t remember where this idea came from. I do remember speaking in a robotic voice, and imagining that somewhere on my back, where I couldn’t see, there was a control panel where my core functions could be accessed.
Granted, I was about 5 or 6 years old.
By the time I was 8 or 9, I would get up early to walk alone to the 6AM Sunday Mass a couple blocks from my home, where I’d get a stripped down liturgy with no silly music and a fire and brimstone homily from the old priest they kept on mothballs for only this particular liturgy. It was a very post-conciliar parish, but Fr. Henry was from a different time.
I’d come home, and while the rest of my family went to the 8AM, I’d sit in front of our old analog television, adjusting the rabbit ears and tuning the dials, trying to get the latest episode of Transformers to come in as more than just a bunch of barely-audible static. (I have no idea why it was on on Sundays, but it was.)
At my grandmother’s house, I’d spend the entire visit playing with an old 2XL robot toy that had a collection of 8-track tapes it used to ask trivia questions that could be responded to with a limited series of push buttons. If you’ve never seen one, this is an old commercial for it. Honestly, it was an incredibly impressive bit of tech:
My greatest material desire as a young boy, though, was to transcend this kind of pre-scripted interaction and get my hands on an OMNi 2000. I have no idea if it would have lived up to the hype, but boy howdy, the hype was real.
OK, it probably wouldn’t have lived up to the hype, but in the 80s, this thing was cutting edge:
I could give more examples, but these suffice. I wanted to live in a world where robots and people lived together in harmony. It was a longstanding dream, even if it only existed in my imagination.
Last night, Elon Musk unveiled that future for real, when he announced the launch of the Tesla Optimus:
Now, I have to be honest. I wasn’t that impressed with what I saw on the stage.
But then, I saw the robots mingling with people after the event, and I was blown away:
A combination of cutting-edge robotics with advanced AI/LLM software makes this thing into a walking, talking version of Grok. I don’t know what LLM they are using in this thing, but Grok, as a Musk product, is a likely choice. All I know is that Optimus’s natural conversation abilities remind me of voice interactions with ChatGPT, which anyone can experience with a paid subscription to that platform and the mobile app. You can have compellingly realistic conversations with it, and it even injects humor and situational awareness. For example, I once used the voice access to ask ChatGPT a question while driving, and my kids were in the back being rowdy. Before it answered, it said, “Whoa, sounds like you guys are having a good time!”
Uncanny stuff.
As I said in my recent post about the most significant issues I see shaping the future of humanity, AI is one of the two big ones. (See below)
I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, for most of the past 8 years, so I had a front row seat to one of the first test-markets for self-driving, autonomous vehicles. The Waymo taxi service, owned by Alphabet, Inc., Google’s parent company, is an impressive thing to see with your own eyes. Here’s a video I took of an empty Waymo driving beside me one night in Scottsdale this past May:
These technologies get adopted slowly at first, then they ramp up. Optimus adds physicality to the already impressive capabilities of our rapidly-advancing large language models, which makes it into a formidable missing link between where we are now and the coming robot apocalypse.
But for the moment, the robot-loving kid in me just thinks it’s pretty neat. I never thought I’d live to see the day.