At Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence Day event held on Thursday night local time, CEO Elon Musk first gave a talk about Tesla’s research in the field of artificial intelligence, and then An actor dancing in tights was brought to the stage, setting off the climax of the day’s activities. Musk said, my Tesla robot.
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Musk explained that the actor wearing this tights is a prototype of a new humanoid robot that Tesla will produce in the near future. After the music and applause gradually dissipated, Musk introduced through the PPT behind him that this Tesla robot is 1.7 meters high, weighs 56 kilograms, and has “human-like dexterous hands”. Boring tasks” were freed.
Although no company in the world can achieve this yet, Musk said that manufacturing a humanoid robot is a logical step Tesla has taken in developing self-driving cars. “Our cars are semi-intelligent robots with wheels,” he said. “There is every reason to apply this technology to the development of humanoid robots. We are also very good at developing sensors, batteries and drives, so we think we might have a prototype of a robot like this sometime next year.”
Even by Musk’s standards, this is a bizarre and wonderful trick. Such a vaudeville show teased Tesla skeptics and satisfied the needs of fans; it not only pushed up the stock price, but also produced a number of eye-catching headlines. It is especially important to build momentum in public opinion, because most of the news about Tesla this week focused on an investigation initiated by the US road safety management agency. This investigation is aimed at Tesla’s Autopilot software that may cause an electric car to hit an emergency vehicle parked on the side of the road. Musk is saying, forget all of this and look at the man in the tights. I promise it will become a real robot next year.
Will everything come true? The fact is that what Musk promised is that Tesla, whose Autopilot system cannot avoid emergency vehicles, will soon produce a fully functional humanoid robot. Musk said that this robot will be able to directly follow the instructions issued by humans and correctly respond to commands such as “please go to the store and buy me the following groceries”. He outlined these scenes, and then said: “Yes, I think we can do it.” And it’s all based on an actor wearing a tights. From this point of view, people have to admire Musk’s boldness.
You know, Boston Dynamics, which is currently able to manufacture the most advanced biped robot Atlas, only calls the robot in the process of research and development. Boston Dynamics said that Atlas is just a way to promote the continuous advancement of robotics technology and is not close to commercialization at all. In a recently released video, Boston Dynamics demonstrated the difficulty of making a biped robot and the behind-the-scenes footage of Atlas repeatedly falling. It is also worth noting that Boston Dynamics has more than a decade of history in the development of Atlas and other biped robots. But Musk believes that his company can surpass Boston Dynamics within a year.
Carl Berry, a lecturer in robotics engineering at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, said in a skeptical tone: “Frankly, (call it) is all light. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t do this kind of research. , But this kind of hype is outrageous.” Berry emphasized that the deployment of robots and artificial intelligence in manufacturing usually requires the simplest machine possible, not the most complex one.
“I’m not saying that it’s not a good thing for Tesla to study this kind of stuff,” he said. “But companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics give the public unrealistic expectations about the capabilities that robots can achieve now or in the years to come.”
If Musk is willing, he may also make something similar to a Tesla robot in 2022. After all, it is not difficult to make a humanoid robot like a robot model in a Disney theme park. Once Musk put such a robot on stage, or even sent it to space, it was just to make headlines. If he did, it would have another interference with existing robotics technology. Currently, robotics is having a huge impact on the manufacturing industry, but there is no need to focus on making machines look like humans.
Musk often adopts this “deception” strategy, and his hyperloop plan is constantly changing over time. At first, this technology was announced as a railgun-like high-speed train system that could transport people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than half an hour. Over the years, the scale of the plan has gradually shrunk until the project becomes an ordinary small tunnel that ordinary people can drive through.
The Tesla robot reminds people of the once famous Sophia robot, which has frequently appeared on the covers of various chat shows and magazines. Sophia is often the object of ridicule by artificial intelligence experts. But as Ben Goertzel, one of the creators of robots, said in 2017, the emergence of Sophia is to stimulate people’s imagination and make people mistakenly believe that the future is closer than the facts. In this process, Sophia Robot attracted more funds and attention for manufacturers.
Gelzel said frankly: “If I tell people that I am using probabilistic logic for reasoning, the purpose is to correct the backlink reasoning tree that appears in the logic engine, they certainly don’t know what I am talking about.” “But if I show them With a beautiful face smiling, they will feel that general artificial intelligence may be really close at hand, and it is feasible.”
This feeling is exactly what Musk wants to instill in investors and ordinary audiences. But unlike the strategy adopted by Sophia Robot, Musk doesn’t even need a robot model to sell his dreams, he only needs an actor in a tights. This is Musk’s innovation.
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