from Hacker News

Elon Musk's Latest Robot Video Accidentally Gives Away the Magic Trick

by reteltech on 1/16/24, 6:13 PM with 25 comments

  • by verdverm on 1/16/24, 6:49 PM

  • by qarl on 1/16/24, 7:49 PM

    Pretty obvious deception, IMHO.

    If the point is to demonstrate the training (which is copying a human) then why hide the human off screen? Because it creates the impression that it's autonomous.

    Putting "but it's not autonomous" in a subsequent tweet is just plausible deniability.

    His fans will argue this is just a simple misunderstanding. C'mon guys. You used to be smarter than this.

  • by wilg on 1/16/24, 7:04 PM

    The text of his tweet also "gives away the magic trick":

    > 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).

  • by genman on 1/16/24, 7:01 PM

    If this can be used for training then this magic trick can be enough. Training a language model uses in principle also just one magic trick - trying to predict a next sentence in a large set of ordered sentences.

  • by DarmokJalad1701 on 1/16/24, 6:43 PM

    > Optimus doesn’t appear have capabilities beyond anything we could do in 1964

    Seems a bit disingenuous. Did the Lincoln robot have the dexterity in its fingers to do fine-motor tasks like folding laundry?

    This has the same energy as saying the Falcon 9 isn't a massive innovation because the Saturn V existed in the 60s. Propulsive landing was done back in the 60s by the Apollo LEM, so obviously the propulsively landing re-usable first stage was "already done before".

  • by Koala_ice on 1/16/24, 6:42 PM

    It’s a multimillion dollar game of “Where’s Waldo”!

  • by iancmceachern on 1/16/24, 9:35 PM

    This is very similar to how Intuitive Surgicals Da Vinci, and many surgical robotics systems work.