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How it started
I have a soft spot for robot fail videos. I watch them on a loop, chuckling to myself, as a kind of therapy. Maybe I’m a sadist, maybe I need to get out more — you can judge me later — but they get me every time. So naturally, I’ve been glued to a clip of Tesla’s Optimus robot falling like a felled tree at the company’s Autonomy Visualized event in Miami that’s been doing the rounds on social media this week.
According to the footage, Elon Musk’s vaunted humanoid robot was handing out water bottles from behind a table before knocking a bunch over, flailing its arms upward, and collapsing backwards like a puppet whose strings had been severed. Watch closely and you’ll see two things: a small plume of water as its arm crushes a bottle mid-fall (it made me laugh), and a motion uncannily similar to someone removing a VR headset.
It wouldn’t be the first time Tesla has faked the autonomous part of its autonomous robot, which Musk says is central to the company’s future. An early demonstration was just a dancer in a skintight bodysuit to show what the Tesla Bot, now Optimus, could be. Later demonstrations were revealed to be (rather obviously, by the sound of it) humans in disguise, operating the robots remotely with something like a VR headset, which we know Tesla uses in development.
Humans have been obsessed with robots for centuries; from ancient tales of stone golems and artificial automatons to modern science fiction, driverless cars, and Roombas, the idea of animating the inanimate with something resembling life has fascinated us. Much of the current hype for humanoids can be traced directly to Musk, so it is reasonable to be more than a little bit skeptical when he and others promise they’ll revolutionize the world. Musk, who has vowed to build a “robot army” of 1 million humanoids, has a deserved reputation as an outlandish and unreliable forecaster, and robotics has ridden more than a few hype waves in its history. In the past, technology has always lagged the enthusiasm of those eager to bring AI into the real world, but today, we’re being told that tech is finally ready to deliver.
So what does ready to deliver actually look like in 2025?
How it’s going
There’s definitely a gold rush of sorts for humanoid robots right now. Every major tech company has them on their roadmap in some capacity, and the likes of Nvidia, Meta, SoftBank, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, and Tesla (duh) are all throwing serious weight — and cash — behind them as the next big frontier in tech. And they’re not alone: A growing constellation of challengers want in on the action, including Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, and 1X.
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