On April 7, Tesla's Austin Gigafactory in Texas opened, and Musk dressed up as a cowboy and directly opened a large body.
At the party, Musk said Tesla is developing a humanoid robot called Optimus. The prototype will be completed by the end of 2022, while the first version will be put into production next year.
Tesla's "Optimus Prime" Last August, Musk publicly demonstrated the idea of Optimus for the first time at Tesla's annual AI Open Day, although at that time, the dancers on AI Day were only humans wearing robot suits. But today, we can glimpse the Optimus Prime that Musk envisions from the public parameter specifications.
According to the parameters, Optimus is 5 feet 8 inches (about 1.73 meters) tall and weighs 125 pounds (about 56 kilograms). The walking speed is 5 miles per hour (8 kilometers per hour) and can lift up to 45 pounds (about 20 kilograms) of items. 20 kilograms is not much, but if you use a weightlifting posture to pull hard, you can also lift a weight of 150 pounds (68 kilograms).
From the parameter point of view, Tesla's "Optimus Prime" seems to be different from the tall and strong "Optimus Prime" we imagined. But perhaps its strength comes more from its brain. It is said that "Optimus Prime" combines Tesla's AI technology, that is, self-driving technology based on the prediction ability of the nervous system of visual neural networks, and a DOJO D1 supercomputer chip with extremely strong computing power. According to the head of the DOJO project, Tesla's DOJO is almost the fastest AI-trained computer in history. Coupled with Tesla's self-created high-bandwidth, low-latency connectors, the computing power can be as high as 9PFLOPs (90 quadrillion times).
In addition, it is worth mentioning that the biggest highlight of "Optimus Prime" is its hand.
This "human-grade" hand, with 5 freely retracted fingers, can also perform the delicate tasks that humans are good at.
Consciousness injects into the machine to immortalize "The most important product development we did this year is actually the 'Optimus Prime' humanoid robot... This business will be more important than the automotive business. At this stage, Musk has three major fears, namely: the declining birth rate of human beings, the crisis of artificial intelligence, and religious extremism. For Musk, the mass production of humanoid robots will effectively solve the labor shortage caused by the decline in the birth rate. After all, the reason for the development of the "Optimus Prime" humanoid robot is to replace humans to do those dangerous, boring and human unwilling to do the work. Of course, as the most important business of Tesla in the future, Musk has high hopes for robots far more than that.
Storing human consciousness in Tesla's Optimus Prime became one of Musk's visions for the future. To this end, he even made a surprising statement, believing that most people do not have to live that long, and that in the future, by injecting consciousness into robots, they can achieve immortality.
As soon as these words came out, they stirred up a thousand waves. Some netizens believe that Musk's crazy idea is to destroy mankind. But don't look at Musk is now so focused on the robot project, blowing his own AI project to the sky.
But in 2018, he publicly stated that "artificial intelligence is more dangerous than nuclear weapons."
Image source: CNBC
Therefore, in order to avoid the artificial intelligence crisis in the Terminator from becoming a reality, Tesla's "Optimus Prime" was designed to be what it is today.
Not tall enough, not strong enough, not even running fast enough. After all, if this robot "rebels", you can still run past him.
Can Musk change the world
At AI Day last year, Musk had said he could launch a humanoid robot this year. As a result, on April 7, the large body of the Texas factory said that it was next year, which showed that the planning of mass production of "Optimus Prime" was a year late.
Experts and netizens have always been skeptical about this matter. Artificial intelligence researcher Gary Marcus has publicly stated that it is ridiculous to claim that a robot that has never been made public can solve all of human tasks in the next year or two. The comments on the business technology reporting website TNW were more explicit, directly calling Musk a liar, thinking that he could say such a thing.
American technology media The Verge said that even Boston Dynamics, which has a foundation for many years, has never had the concept of commercial deployment of robots.
It is hard to imagine Tesla wanting to surpass Boston Dynamics' decades of technology accumulation in a year or two.
Of course, Musk, known as a "technology maniac", has always acted out of line with common sense. Whether it will be able to mass-produce "Optimus Prime" next year is also unknown. If next year, the robot that claims to be able to make humans live a rich life really succeeds, Musk may change the world again.