Tesla promises to build robot you could beat up – or beat in a race
- Reference: 1629446650
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/08/20/tesla_ai_day/
- Source link:
CEO Elon Musk on Thursday announced the project at the automaker's [1]AI day , saying that Tesla already does most of the things a robot needs – sensing, AI, and actuators – and claimed without a hint of irony that the company's cars are already "semi-sentient" robots thanks to their self-driving capabilities.
That'll be the capabilities being [2]probed and [3]challenged in America right now after several auto-autos were involved in nasty crashes.
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With all that expertise in hand, Musk suggested Tesla might as well therefore build a robot.
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Details were scant. Musk suggested the bot will stand 5'8" (178.8cm) tall, weigh 125 pounds (56.7kg), and be capable of carrying 45 pounds (20kg) or deadlifting 150 pounds (68kg). The bot has a brief to eliminate "dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks."
"It's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans," Musk said, adding that flesh-and-blood humans could "most likely overpower it" and definitely outrun it – which is reassuring to anyone who has watched Westworld .
[7]
Behold, the Teslabot ... Click to enlarge
A prototype will arrive some time in 2022, Musk promised.
Tesla has also promised to ramp production of its cars, deliver a [8]Cybertruck and a semi-truck — and has blown deadlines for all. In 2019, Musk promised a million robot taxis would hit the road in 2020.
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None have made it out of the factory, never mind out of a garage. But some have made it onto [10]the streets of Beijing using tech from China's Baidu.
So yeah, let's all look forward to Tesla selling humaniform robots – despite conventional thinking suggesting that replicating our own bodies is far from the best way to perform dangerous tasks, and that replicating complicated parts of the human body like fingers creates complexity.
Musk's robotic announcement came at Tesla's AI Day, at which the manufacturer revealed more about its in-house efforts to develop the technology and put it to work.
[11]
Execs detailed how Tesla has built its own training computer and silicon to cope with the immense AI models the carmaker requires.
Among the kit inside is Tesla's own D1 silicon, built on a seven-nanometre manufacturing process and possessing 362 teraflops of processing power apiece. Tesla puts 25 D1s onto a "tile" and assembles the tiles into a distributed computer, said Ganesh Venkataraman, senior director of Autopilot hardware. Tesla places 25 of these chips onto a single "training tile". Six tiles go into "trays" and Tesla will put a pair of trays into each cabinet of a supercomputer called Dojo.
[12]Senators urge US trade watchdog to look into whether Tesla may just be over-egging its Autopilot, FSD pudding
[13]Samsung's latest spin on ISOCELL shifts camera tech from smartphones into autonomous vehicles
[14]Poltergeist attack could leave autonomous vehicles blind to obstacles – or haunt them with new ones
[15]Toyota buys Lyft’s autonomous car group for $550m
Execs promised Dojo will go live next year and will be the fastest AI training computer anywhere. Tesla intends to use it to run PyTorch, and has a next-gen plan for faster hardware still.
Musk suggested that Dojo could be used to work on applications beyond Tesla's own needs for autonomous driving, but again offered no details.
He did, however, repeatedly say that in his opinion Tesla is probably the world's biggest user of AI.
And then he then turned the presentation into a job ad.
"We basically want to encourage anyone who is interested in solving real-world AI problems at either the hardware or the software level to join Tesla, or consider joining Tesla," said Musk.
Or maybe consider joining Baidu, which also has [16]AI-centric silicon and is already working on applications beyond robo-cars. Or perhaps another Chinese AI automaker – Geely – takes your fancy, seeing as last week it inked a pact with Renault to take its tech to the world. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0z4FweCy4M&t=2814s
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/16/tesla_autopilot_investigation_us_odi/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/us_ftc_probe/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YR99YZ4u-tpNtzOyZnc@AAAAAAs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YR99YZ4u-tpNtzOyZnc@AAAAAAs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YR99YZ4u-tpNtzOyZnc@AAAAAAs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/08/20/screenshot_telsa_bot_trimmed.jpg
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2019/11/22/smashing_tesla_cybertruck/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YR99YZ4u-tpNtzOyZnc@AAAAAAs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/06/baidu_apollo_robotaxi/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YR99YZ4u-tpNtzOyZnc@AAAAAAs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/us_ftc_probe/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/13/samsung_isocell_autonomous_vehicles/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/poltergeist_autonomous_vehicles/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/27/toyota_buys_lyfts_autonomous_cars/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/baidu_ai_chip/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "Semi sentient"
Surely, you know that "Semi" is the first step to achieve "Full". Just like the westworld thingy, they need time. It may be "Semi" bollocks now, but they will evolve into "Full" bollocks and conquer the world in a real bath of blood. I've seen it on television, so it must be true!
Re: "Semi sentient"
Of course the beauty of this term is that "semi" has an infinite range of vernacular definitions. It's strict meaning of "50%" is probably not even open to formal specification (which 50%?), so what we've been handed is a moveable PR feast (much as usual from the Musk(k)eg).
Musk-Time
As much as I admire what Elon has achieved with Tesla & SpaceX, one thing he is consistent with are his delivery estimates. "Optimistic" is a massive understatement. "Fantasy" might be a better word.
Re: Musk-Time
Musk's fantastic statements are not intended for the consumption of techno-savvy individuals, it is put out there to inspire the less well informed to part with their hard earned currency.
As far as his humaniform bot is concerned, conventional thinking may be more aligned with the idea of more or less built to purpose forms for robots but nature has already shown the human form to be a useful general purpose design.
Musk doesn't need millions of years to come up with something approximating a human as he has models to look at as a basis for applying existing tech to make something similar and then improve subsequent models.
So long as it can recognise pedestrians and trucks......
Re: Musk-Time
Well, in an interview where he was walking around the new Starship build, he did say his deadlines were super optimistic, then he said "if I wasn't optimistic, then I wouldn't have tried to land boosters on barges, or build the biggest fully reusable orbital rocket. Everyone has repeatedly told me how impossible all that is."
However, I don't see how this robot "gets us to Mars"
Re: Musk-Time
Hoping to transfer your consciousness to it via the neuralink they are developing?? He is 'optimistic' about things, so you never know:-)
Theranos again?
After successful deploy of 1 million working robotaxi on the road, this terminator thing is going to be a piece of cake.
"It's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans,"
Let's hope it is better at going into caves than his last attempt.
Re: "It's intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans,"
It would have been great, it was all pedo guys fault, this will hunt down pedo guy.
Nope
No, just no. Fuck off, Musk.
Tesla is also using a new type of inch. 5'8" used to be 172.72cm but the new improved Tesla Inch is 2.63cm, meaning 5'8" is now 178.8cm
I rather suspect that's a journalist error... since the tesla slide only mentions imperial units.
Humanoid bots
I fully expect :
- that this will take a lot longer than Musk says to hit the market (if it ever does)
- that the bot will not be able to do anything more useful than carry something or stand guard
- that it will have to be plugged in all night, else it will run out of power
- that you'd better not put it in a crystal shop
We don't have the technology for a fully-autonomous, humanoid robot. Hell, we can hardly make a dog-like robot that doesn't scream its presence to everyone within 100 meters.
This is a pipe dream. Not going to happen.
"Semi sentient"
Musk certainly has a knack for spouting complete and utter bollocks.