“Look, even here you have to speed up the video with the edits. No one trusts you now @elonmusk,” complained one X user about the video.
Others believed the video looked great, including tech evangelist Robert Scoble, the most famous man for wearing Google Glass while showering. It’s strange that “Scoble” was the one who first pointed out the fact that “Musk’s” robots at the Cybercab event were not working autonomously.
“Hahaha. @elonmusk “Let’s all talk for a few days about the fact that artificial intelligence isn’t what it seems, then we can share this video,” wrote Scoble on X’s platform.
To be clear, Scoble believes the video is impressive and appears to be a real display of artificial intelligence, despite not showing anything advanced that can be verified accurately. But others at X were confused about Scoble’s wording, just like we were.
“I don’t understand, then was Optimus already working independently when it delivered items during the event after all? I thought people and engineers said it was being remotely controlled?” asked another person to Scoble.
“No,” Scoble replied, “it was under human control most of the time.” “They were working on building a separate. The demonstration was limited to avoid errors. But now I wonder if artificial intelligence is more than I thought, like pouring drinks.”
Tesla never got back to Gizmodo when we emailed questions about the autonomy of the robots at the “We, Robot” event. But the new video doesn’t actually show anyone being poured a drink either. Optimus delivers people bottles of drinks and we still don’t know the extent of human interaction involved in the process. We just have to take Tesla’s word for it as being artificial intelligence and “autonomous.”
There is also the tether connected to Optimus in the video which has not been explained at all, highlighted by us in yellow below. The robotic waiters at the Tesla Cybercab event had no visible tethers.
“Musk” has a long history of trying to make his projects look more impressive than they are in reality. Last January, Musk tweeted a video of Optimus folding a shirt. But by chance, the demonstration revealed a person off-camera remotely operating the robot. You can see the human hand occasionally dipping into frame, as we highlighted in the red arrow in the GIF image below.
Tesla’s robot competitors started adding “no remote operation” disclaimers to their videos in the months following Musk’s attempt to deceive people’s eyes.
Bloomberg’s coverage of the new Optimus video doesn’t hint at editing or manipulation or anything suspicious, but they did get some fun details: “Musk personally approved the video, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named.” It will be set for discussion with company operations, according to Bloomberg.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla is not the first person to trick demonstrations of robots. In the 1950s, the American intelligence community helped present a robot demonstration to the Soviet Union during a technology expo in Moscow. Soviet onlookers were told that the automated vacuum cleaner was working independently, and the presentation aimed to imply that the average American family would soon have these kinds of things. In reality, there was a man sitting behind a two-way mirror with a remote control device.
Some things never change.
