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There has been a lot of hype news in robotics + AI lately, as the AI updates just continue to come at a blinding pace. From Tesla/XAI we have the Optimus robot, which I can't tell if this is a major breakthrough or just another marketing splash driven by Elon.
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
You also have Google's I/O, which I haven't had the energy to look into.
With the speed of AI updates and the wars of hype, it's always hard to tell who is actually advancing the frontier. But it does seem that in particular robotics are advancing quite rapidly compared to even a couple of years ago. Personally I think that while automating white collar work is useful and such, AI entering into robotics will be the real game changer. If we can begin to massively automate building things like housing, roads, and mass manufactured goods, all of the sudden we get into an explosive growth curve.
Of course, this is where AGI doomer fears do become more salient, so that's something to watch out for.
Either way, another day, another AI discourse. What do you think of this current crop of news?
Musk is famous for overpromising and excessively-optimistic timelines. He's basically the Peter Molyneux of tech. I wouldn't take anything he says seriously, unless we see the robot performing household tasks with proof that there isn't someone operating it like a waldo.
If I may AKSHULLY for a moment.
He overpromises and never delivers on schedule...
And then STILL delivers an end result closer to the hype than any of his rivals.
That's been the secret. Hype something up and then deliver (eventually) a product that doesn't live up to the hype but is still better than anything else in its class.
There's yet to be an example I can think of where he made a promise then got beaten by a competitor to delivering on it.
So failing to deliver isn't fatal if nobody else can beat you to delivering.
If you burn billions of dollars trying to deliver something no one even bothers trying to make, then it can very easily prove fatal. It doesn' matter that the competition didn't try to beat him to the Cybertruck, or Semi, or Optimus, if these things are nothing but massive money sinkholes. Also, pretty sure that strictly speaking, Waymo beat him to the Cybercab / Robotaxi.
If you mess it up bad enough, it can even overturn your prior success. If Starship doesn't work out, and the competitors catch up to Falcon in the meantime, that's still pretty fatal for SpaceX.
I mean, that's the whole reason for the hype, isn't it? To make sure you sell a bunch of the thing before people realize its not quite up to snuff. He's a much better salesman than other billionaire founders.
And he's also got a knack for finding ways to squeeze profits out of projects by some lateral thinking:
What to do with unused launch capacity on Falcon? Launch a network of satellites for a globe-spanning internet service. Satellites that need to be replenished regularly. Starlink is a great product in its own right and justifies Falcon launches, so it helps keep SpaceX solvent.
Then he pulled that switcheroo with Twitter by selling it to the AI company, so that even if he never turns a profit on twitter as a service, he's already got a way to profit from the information.
To say nothing of how quickly Grok has become an important part of X's infrastructure.
This is why the claim that Elon is stupid and lucky don't make sense to me. Guy may not play 4d chess, but he's playing speed chess like a grandmaster, making sure his few mistakes don't ruin him by moving faster than his opponents, if only by a split second.
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Tesla robotaxi comes to mind. Waymo has been serving customers and steadily increasing its coverage for years now. Musk has been promising autonomous robotaxis since 2019 (initial timeline: 2020) and Waymo launched its Phoenix pilot in 2022.
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