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Bot What It Seems
In August 2021, Elon Musk’s Tesla held a flashy event announcing its plans to build a humanoid robot. The so-called Tesla Bot, a product that’s since been renamed Optimus, danced onto the stage, pulling off some awkward moves.
In reality, the EV maker wasn’t even remotely ready to show off a fully-fledged android. Instead, Tesla had sent out an actor wearing a black and white bodysuit, a cringey gaffe that had investors asking some hard questions. (Five years on, Tesla is still struggling to launch a production-ready version of the bot.)
Now, a small robotics software company — recently selected as a partner with Google DeepMind’s Robotics Program in Europe — has seemingly attempted to pull off a similar stunt.
A slick promotional video the firm posted on social media on Tuesday shows a sleek humanoid robot walking into a minimalist, wood-paneled kitchen to wash up some dishes. Its movements are astonishingly lifelike — so much so, in fact, that critics immediately started wondering whether it was a real robot moving in the physical world or some type of AI generation or other trickery.
Qualia has been selected for the @GoogleDeepMind Robotics Program.
We train embodied models that put a robot on a real manual task and make it work, on the floor, not in a demo.
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