My liberal arts view (I'm not an engineer) on all the fuss about Tesla using tele-op and audio pass through at the We, Robot event:
For starters, what they did was revolutionary. Having that number of Bipedal Humanoids operating in parallel with ONE mistake is insane. Especially the walking sequence... holy fuck. anyone in humanoid space will tell you-- that was incredible.
Tele-Op
My general take is people are so caught up in "is this autonomy or not" that they are missing history happen in front of their eyes... I will also say that no one on earth right now has a data set diverse and large enough to execute what they did at that event fully autonomous... Which is okay, because it is through tele-operating such a wide variety of interactions of the such that will get the world to a place that robot brains are capable of doing it all by themselves. There is a really really bad misconception amongst humanoid fans and followers that everything can be autonomous no problem because teams like Tesla, 1X, Figure etc. etc. have dropped good autonomy demos. But the truth is that these demos required an ass load of tele-op data to bring a very limited set of actions to life. and unless there is some miracle AI breakthrough, Tele-oping at scale will remain a crucial part of teaching our robots to fly-- I would encourage all humanoid robot fans to change their perspective from "OMG THERES A HUMAN THIS IS SO DUMB" to "Look at that human teach that robot everything he knows so one day it can operate all on it's own"
Voice Pass Through
Realtime voice conversation with AI is solved-- get your panties out of a bunch. Elon and team could have easily done that with voice if they really wanted to but LLM convo's wouldn't have been anywhere near as fun as having those guys do pass thru and teleop-- those videos were so fun and enjoyable to watch. Stop being an asshole.
To wrap this up-- if you want to see humanoids come into the world, get smart about just how that is going to happen and instead of dogging on every team that goes out and sets forth beautiful demonstrations/narratives for the future, fan the flame of physical intelligence being conjured from sand. Every hit piece headline about "Tesla's robots aren't even autonomous" is a net-negative for what we are trying to accomplish here-- we can change the narrative, especially here on X.
Regards,
Me