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 gon na, 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 gon na 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 gon na be able to know that that's headphones, or is it gon na 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.