The flying car demonstration last week was cute but don’t expect to drive like George Jetson any time soon. Humanoid robots, however, are starting to get into production with the old Tesla plant in Fremont, California, hoping to crank out 20,000 a week by the end of next year.
Making a machine is one thing. Programming them is another. In an earnings call this week—which included answering questions from investors, analysts and the media—Elon Musk explained how he will program the robots. He will let them play and learn, mimicking how humans program their young.
In order for Optimus to get the training data we need, we actually need to make a lot of Optimi. So we need to make, I think, on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots and then have them do self-play. We’re building up an Optimus academy where Optimus can practice doing a very wide range of tasks
And then we can use that data in a flywheel to make it better and better at these various tasks, a big difference with Optimus versus the cars
Is we don’t have this vast fleet of cars from which we can gather training data. So with Optimus, we have to bootstrap it by making the robots and having them do self-play, which is really how a human learns to navigate the world
You can see this when you have a toddler and they grow up and they initially are wobbly and they don’t know how to do things, and eventually they, they learn to wipe their own ass, which is a big milestone, because anyone who’s had kids knows
And then they learn to read and do all sorts of things and be able to do these things. And they learn this by playing
And we actually need Optimus to play at scale in order to have it be really good at tasks in the real world.
Data in a flywheel is jargon for using customer experience to improve your product.
This is how Interesting Engineering reported that statement, “Software also presents a significant challenge. Tesla must develop the capabilities that allow Optimus to handle unfamiliar tasks reliably. Musk said considerable work remains before the robot can perform a broad range of activities independently.”
Journalism. Bringing the world to you as watered down and boring as possible.
One reply on Twitter said, “Toddler phase now, butler phase later. Just hoping it skips the tantrum stage.”
I laughed but then I asked myself, what if the tantrum stage is the most crucial? What if that is how we learn to deal with failure and frustration? Given the reactions in public we see today, many people have not graduated from that phase.
Musk will use the experience of the Optimi in the academy to program other robots. This is similar to how he improved Tesla by tracking customer data. He was able to generate real-world driving data from tens of millions of miles per day. This improves Tesla’s self-driving. Competitors do the same thing but he is doing the data collection on a much larger scale.
I like that he’s using the Latin plural of Optimus. I also like that he is constantly trying new things. But I really like that he embraces failure—oh no! a billion-dollar rocket just blew up—as a learning opportunity.
Musk owns Twitter. After 18 years on and off Twitter, I finally learned the keys to success.
Lucas Sanders with 91,000 followers posted a video and tweeted, “AG Todd Blanche: They accuse me of not being independent from the White House. I’m not. I work for Trump.”
Francesca Fiorentini with 129,000 followers replied, “he’s too dumb to know this is unconstitutional”
Richard DeCamp with less than 9,000 followers replied, “The Attorney General is part of the executive branch and works for the president.”
What is the lesson in this? Don’t capitalize and don’t punctuate. You’ll get more followers.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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