The Tesla Bot: Explained!

[Music] so tesla just announced a whole human-sized human-shaped sentient robot this is not a drill this is a thing that really just happened and a lot of things come to mind when hearing that so let's get into it now the two things that might have come to your mind when hearing that like me are number one why tesla of all companies and number two why a robot human of all things but if you frame it a certain way it actually can make a lot of sense but you got to break a few things down first to get there so let's get there so tesla tesla is a car company mostly you know i've reviewed their cars we've seen their announcements they're factories maybe we'll call it a vehicle company they have a truck they have a bunch of other stuff but they have a factory that makes cars so they're a car company but only like by that specific definition it's actually pretty common to look at tesla as a software company uh just because their software advantage and all the things that they do with the software in their cars is so important to them it's like they're a software company that happens to make electric cars and so when you compare to the mercedes of the world or the audis of the world or bmws i would never describe those companies as software companies but for tesla that's where their main advantages and so part of this software thing that they're doing is this self-driving project okay now aside from all the massive missed time windows and over-optimistic promises and deadlines and things like that their self-driving is currently as it is today some of the most advanced in the world and it's not because of high resolution mapping or predetermined routes it's because teslas are using their sensors and or mostly cameras at this point and constantly scanning their environments and making thousands of little on-the-fly decisions in real time and then all of the miles driven with this autopilot in action is used to upload the data back to their servers and train the whole rest of the fleet so it's this whole this whole system is a constantly self-improving thing the bigger it gets the faster it can continue to get better so this requires a lot of computing a lot of horsepower to be frank and a lot of smart code and that's what tesla's been really good at so tesla had their ai day a couple days ago you might not have heard about it but they do this every year they live stream a bunch of talks from tesla engineers about computer vision and how their neural networks have evolved over time and explaining their focus on making autonomous cars that rely on computer vision and their synthetic visual cortex it's really great lots of informative complex stuff and at this year's they unveiled their new custom d1 chip which is this chip that's designed and built entirely in-house by a car company which is specifically made to train tesla's full self-driving algorithms based on driving footage even faster and they're basically going to be replacing all of their gpus they're currently using to make this super computer designed to do computer vision machine learning it's big stuff and so at some point during all of this elon's on stage talking and he says something about to the effect of tesla is basically a robotics company uh tesla is arguably the world's biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels and if you think about it it's like okay yeah i could i could see that i mean obviously tesla tesla builds cars so we'll call them a car company still but like if it's tesla's ai day and they're giving a presentation and they're trying to make as good of a show as possible for recruiting purposes they're going to call it robots so they happen to make robots that are on wheels but yeah that's that's how you can get it to make sense mentally it's like all right yeah self-driving cars is just one application of ai and computer vision and robotics just to just to solve that problem so that's what's happening it's a bunch of sensors scanning its environment making a bunch of decisions based on that and then training future versions of it based on what happens that's just what's happening in self-driving cars so that i can see making sense then elon right afterward said this uh it it kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form he says it makes sense to make these robots in a humanoid form and that is where i disagree so this is the newly unveiled tesla robot it's it's called teslabot it's a five foot eight 125 pound sleek looking like black and white human shaped robot with this face mask with a screen on it it's got hands with you know full 10 fingers it's got feet but with no toes it's pretty slow it has a max speed of 5 miles per hour so that you can outrun it and then it can lift things up up to 10 pounds with the arms extended or it can dead lift 150 lots of cameras and actuators and of course the full self-driving computer inside so they're saying it's going to be easy to overpower or run away from so that should never be a concern uh but the main purpose the purpose of this tesla bot the thing that they kept saying over and over again on stage during the presentation and during q as when they're asked about it they kept defaulting to it will be able to do tasks that are repetitive dangerous or boring so that humans don't have to and so if you buy if you buy tesla as a robotics company then yeah this makes sense it's just another robot that will use the sensors to scan its environment and make a bunch of decisions and navigate around this world that it's in but the thing that i have to say and this is going to come with a caveat that i'm of course not a robotics engineer i'm not an expert at this but here's my take the human form is very inefficient now don't get me wrong humans we're pretty great right we're very accomplished species and we're very complex and we've done a lot of things well but they work as a body so well because number one our brains are amazing but number two because we've built this world around us that we live in mostly with ergonomics designed for humans but when it's not designed for humans like this upright bipedal thing that's balancing all the time it's not very efficient we just did a retro tech episode about this about humanoid robots so i'll link it below if you haven't already watched it it's it's a super fun one but we did a lot of talking with people and experts about this and it turns out if you want to make a robot to take over a task you typically don't want to build it like a human you want to build it for a single task and make it as efficient as possible at that one task so pop culture forever has been obsessed with humanoid robots like i can't even count all the instances of humanoid-shaped robots in movies and tv shows over the years that we found it's something we've been fascinated with since the beginning of time there's endless versions of it but it turns out the ideal way to make a robot vacuum the floor for you is not to build a human-sized shaped robot that pushes around a vacuum it's to make the robot the vacuum the vacuum is the robot you don't want a humanoid robot standing at the sink washing dishes for you the dishwasher is the robot like that's the single purpose-built robot tesla knows this you don't have a humanoid shaped robot sitting in your car driving the car for you the car is the robot the self-driving car that drives itself has already been done so the list of things you would want a human-shaped robot for is pretty small because labor is typically not designed around the human form the one example they kept giving over and over in their ai day presentation was grocery shopping so they you know you walk to the grocery store you grab a cart or a basket and you pick out some items and put them in the basket i guess that's you know you need a bunch of different peripherals and things to pull that off and maybe a human-shaped robot would be fine for that but there's not a whole lot else i can think of like even when i picture the most simple boring tasks like making a bed or building a table like when i picture a robot that would be especially good at that i don't picture a human-shaped one i picture one that's super focused and super efficient maybe i'm just short-sighted but i remember when i talked with elon at the factory a couple years ago about all the things that they do with robots versus the couple of things left that they still do with humans he had a really interesting answer so some parts of it are like 80 to 90 automated and then some parts of it are like uh only 10 to 20 or what are those what are those parts that humans do better than humans are really good at adaptation um and rapid evolution and like doing like little like finicky things like like that um it's like like trying to connect uh a hose that's like sort of dangling around i see and and and you're like the robot's like gonna find the hose grab it like then connect it to another hose at that point it's like really hard yeah like a person can just go ah they're done gotcha yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah and it's like when you see it it's like wow it's super super obvious and then we try to have robots do this and it's like robots like grabbing the wrong thing and like stick it over here and they're like oh the the the hose was here when the rover thought it was here and so now it like tries to grab air and then like smashes into the car it's like you don't want that we yeah it was the comedy of ours uh tragedy of ours so yeah all that all that really made me think like with as good as tesla is with self-driving why would you want a humanoid a human-shaped robot to try to do things that humans are already good at how long is it going to take for that robot to actually get good at things that humans are good at and you know what the best way to answer that would probably be to look at the most advanced robotics company that i can think of at the moment which is boston dynamics so there's like there's two very different uh types of humanoid robots that i've seen exist in this world on one end it's like the dumb single purpose thing you see at ces like these are the barely functional robots you see that can really do only a few things decently well they're kind of cheesy looking they're human shaped for no reason but they exist and then on the other end of the spectrum there's boston dynamics atlas and man i wish when i was out there i could have seen atlas in person because just the dog spot is already impressive enough like it's got the sensors it has a basic level of understanding scanning its environment and it can be programmed to do dangerous or boring or repetitive things and go places that humans wouldn't go and we say dog because they've called it spot and it's kind of looks like a dog if you make it behave the right way sometimes but really it's just a quadruped any four-legged animal would do but atlas on the other hand well well i haven't necessarily seen it do anything specifically useful yet but seeing that five-foot human-shaped robot navigate the world in crazy ways is something else i mean i did share a new video of it uh doing parkour and elon seemed very impressed but even after all these years of development and the history of how much we've seen it get better atlas is not a robot that's going to be on sale for people to buy anytime soon and if you ask them about it they'll tell you it's just them experimenting with their computing in a new form factor and so at the end of the day my take teslabot probably won't exist anytime soon either you know i know they said on stage there would be a prototype maybe next year i uh i kind of doubt that they're gonna leapfrog boston dynamics in the next two years but then here's the other thing even if they do come out with it tesla right now is training their self-driving computers with billions and billions of miles of self-driving happening on the streets today right so the best way to get as much data about that as possible is to have it go out in the real world and do it it's kind of genius actually that they're making so many cars and people are really using it for them but now they're going to be asking for a humanoid robot to go out and navigate the entire rest of the real world where there's an order of magnitude more stuff to identify and react to like i mean on the streets there's obviously other cars and trucks and buses and it can identify motorcycles and bicycles and pedestrians even and then there's traffic cones and there's lights and all the rest of the traffic control devices construction zones arrows on the road it's kind of starting to run out that's almost it but how well is the tesla bot going to do when you ask it to go get bananas from the grocery store like really like how good could it get or if you ask it hey uh teslabot go grab my airpods max from downstairs is it gonna be able to know that that's headphones or is it gonna have to have a model of every new pair of headphones that ever comes out to be able to identify which one you're talking about and all of this training that's you can see where i'm coming from all this training has to come from real world data which i guess would have to come from people using tesla pots in their homes and starting to get this going which seems a little less likely to me than uh people getting a self-driving car and then there's just a whole bunch of other unknowns about this robot too uh what other colors will it come in will it come in matte black how does it charge will it just sit on a usb port in the corner of a room every day i don't know will this ever even go on sale and i don't know if it's really even about this robot going on sale as much as it is just about honestly it could really just be tesla exploring their computer vision in another form factor just like boston dynamics it's just about tesla becoming the best ai and computer vision company that they possibly can and this being just one more avenue to get better at it so there's no good reason i can think of for a humanoid robot to exist out there in people's hands anyway but hey makes a lot of good headlines it's obviously something we've been fascinated with forever and will continue to be for a long time and it could just be one more form factor that tesla's exploring and also one of they ever said no to a good free pr opportunity so anyway that's about my thoughts on it i'm super curious what you guys think if you have any thoughts on would you want something like this in your own home do you think the robot will exist i'm sure the comment section will be fun below this one either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 4,791,185

Keywords: Tesla Bot, Teslabot, Tesla robot, humanoid robot, Elon Musk, MKBHD, Tesla Bot explained, self driving, self driving robot

Id: Wk1oClYJE58

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/shaim2]

"So I've been using the Tesla Bot for 3 months now, and ..."

[u/LilBitchBoyAjitPai]

I like MKBHD but I feel like it’s a dumb take to say no we don’t need a teslabot… we just need to invest/maintain dozens of purpose built robots for specific tasks/chores.

[u/wpwpw131]

MKBHD doesn't seem to understand that humanoid robots are clearly the most friendly looking multi-functional robot. Like Boston Dynamic's robot has a better form factor, but looks like it's going to murder you and your family. Not only is the world made for humans, but humans are normalized to humans. Obviously there is very little research done around this, but it's probably much more likely that people will rob this than the Tesla Bot, which actually looks like a dude walking around.

Also, you don't have to leapfrog Boston Dynamics in pure robotics to create Tesla Bot. Tesla Bot in terms of robotics is very advanced, but doesn't actually require the agility or dexterity that Boston Dynamics has shown. It requires a huge natural language processing model and a bunch of other advanced AI, which is most certainly not what Boston Dynamics is known for. Therein lines the reason Atlas will never be for sale: you have to give it explicit instruction for anything, which a consumer cannot do.

[u/ComputerNoBueno]

Not knowing the answer shouldn’t prevent exploration.

[u/Imightbewrong44]

Elon's products/companies are just to get to explore space and Mars.

Literally everything he makes currently will really enable the full Mars colony when you think about it.

He is just practicing/perfecting on earth first while also making all the money he will need to make it there.

[u/somsci]

Who knows if Tesla can pull it off but MKBHD is missing the point. Tesla can exploit the ability to understand the world from vision to flexibly interact with the world. Control problems aside, understanding the world it’s a big issue and they have a jump on it.

[u/DrElectrons]

Tesla can simulate the world for the robot. A lot can be simulated.

[u/CryptoMaximalist]

The big miss here is the concept of arbitrary work. You can make a task-specific bot that will be excellent at one thing, and that has a place in the world, but there are a lot of tasks that are not worth making a specific bot for. Try telling your vacuum robot to make the bed and see what happens.

Humans are pretty good at a lot of things. That's why humanoid form factor is the way it is. Wheels are great for speed but fail on certain irregular terrain. Our hands are dexterous, but not as strong as they otherwise could be.

A robot doesn't have to be perfect at every task to be worth it, it just has to be good enough to handle it for humans. If you can make a bot that handles a lot of arbitrary tasks, that has massive value. Humanoid design can make a lot of sense

[u/ChristianM]

I feel like he just glanced over the fact that the new chip will give them a pretty big boost in neural training, just like everyone out there did.

And nobody will start a completely new product with multiple form factors. They have to choose one, get efficient at manufacturing it, and the humanoid form is the most safe choice at first. For public acceptance and for training, since pretty much everything should be easily accessible in that form.