Comment by phendrenad2
19 hours ago
Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.
19 hours ago
Yeah I don't buy this announcement. Converting their huge Fremont facility to just making humanoid robots? Do they have some large buyer or something? I'm skeptical.
I suspect it's going dormant for a couple years and then he'll say "Hey, this robot thing isn't working out, so we're closing the facility." He doesn't have any desire to stay in California.
A reasonable guess.
As far as I can tell, the number of humanoid robots doing anything productive is zero. It's all demos.
This is far harder than self-driving. As a guy from Waymo once said in a talk, "the output is only two numbers" (speed and steering angle).
Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video. Tesla is not the leader.
Remember the "cobot" boom of about five years ago? Easy to train and use industrial robots safe around humans? Anybody?
I'm not saying this is impossible, but that it's too early for volume production. This will probably take as long as it took to get to real robotaxis.
> Also, there are at least 18 humanoid robots good enough to have a Youtube video.
Agreed, thing is the robot hardware isn't the hard part anymore, the top ten robots are all sufficient to be transformative if they had good enough AI.
My bet is on Google/Gemini being the first to market from what I've seen so far.
Boston dynamics is a leader in getting robots to do useful niche work in well bounded environments, but that's yesterday's news.
The story needs only to hold up until car production has shut down.
S and X were a small fraction of Fremont already. The plant can do >500k units per year, but S/X were closer to 20k.
It sounds like this would be giving ~5% of the factory space to Optimus production, which seems reasonable.
they have a large buyer - all of the silly people investing money in the company
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We can kill robots without remorse, and they're likely going to be worse than a human agent at most things for a few years. Not a bad timeline for them to waste their time on.
As insane as American politics is "I can blast robots on my property" has exactly the right amount of crank appeal to be possibly the final 90/10 issue
What if they're private property though? Historically, the state has always valued private property over human lives, so the response could be even more brutal.
Except we're the ones that pay for robots, and the cleanup and the settlements.
IF they work (and that is a massive, massive if), every factory on earth will replace every human with them.
It’s inevitable, the only question is how many years until it happens: 2, 5, 10, 50?
Place your bets!
Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?
"Do think factories are still mostly humans on assembly lines?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
china dark factory
Factory robots have almost nothing in common with humanoid robots and are probably at least 10000x simpler.
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Not mostly, no.
But I toured an auto assembly plant of a major US OEM recently and there were a ton of humans on the line.
Unions will be an issue, but all the OEMs are walking dead anyway.
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