The Optimus Slide

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Very early on in my career in high tech, I traveled to visit a customer in Missouri concerning some engineering work on their broadband network.

I was explaining something about what our technology could do, and my customer said, “Show me. Don’t you know Missouri is the Show-Me State?”

It really stuck with me.

Words, jargon, forecasts, marketing, and virtue signaling are nothing more than how someone else wants something to be seen. And it may have nothing to do with what really is.

This is why, in my research, we emphasize the data, scientific research, facts, performance, pictures, and sometimes video. Our goal is to show you, our subscribers, what’s really happening.

So that’s what we’re going to do today. Because if I didn’t show you some short video clips of what’s been blowing up over the internet in the last 24 hours, you might not believe me…

And you might miss that what is really happening is extraordinary.

“Misdirection” & “Tomfoolery”

To set the stage, literally, is a short video below.

Longtime Bleeding Edge readers will remember this clip well.

It’s from a 2021 product announcement, featuring a representation of a future product from Tesla.

That product was Optimus, an intelligent, autonomous, humanoid robot that could even have the agility and dexterity to do something like dance.

But of course, in 2021, Musk didn’t have a working prototype of Optimus yet.

So as a sort of clever joke – very “on brand” for Musk – he had a human dressed up as a robot come out on stage to dance, just before Musk himself took to the stage to present his vision for Tesla’s new Optimus product line.

Musk said right then it would become Tesla’s biggest product ever…

And the tech journalists and many experts eviscerated him.

“Elon Musk’s bizarre demo laid bare the truth of many new tech demos: They are a storyboarded vision of the future held together by digital duct tape.” – WIRED

“Basically just a piece of concept art, without real technology to back up Elon Musk’s flashy announcement.” – Daily Dot

One passive-aggressive journalist had this to say about Musk:

Elon Musk got up on stage last night and promised that Tesla, a company whose driver assist software is unable to reliably avoid parked ambulances, would soon build a fully functioning humanoid robot. Musk said that the machine would be able to follow human instructions intuitively, responding correctly to commands like “please go to a store and get me the following groceries.” He outlined these scenarios and then said, “Yeah, I think we can do that.” This was minutes after he’d ushered away the best demo of the Tesla Bot available: a dancer in a spandex suit.

Source: The Verge

The journalist also included in his dribble a quote from a lecturer and “expert” in robotics engineering, who had this trite hogwash to share…

[Calling it] horse shit sounds generous, frankly. I’m not saying that he shouldn’t be doing research like this, but it’s the usual overblown hype.

The rest of the article was even worse, suggesting that the event was nothing more than “misdirection.” And that it was designed to “inculcate in his audience.” The event was “tomfoolery,” which “ginned up the share price.”

What was striking to me – in all the coverage I saw at the time – was the complete absence of any research or demonstration of the understanding of Tesla’s existing technology at the time.

The “Robot on Wheels” Prototype

Everyone knew that Musk’s presentation was about a future product direction, not about an existing product.

Featuring a dancer on stage in a suit – designed to look like a humanoid robot – was simply tongue-in-cheek, having a bit of a laugh before getting down to business. And again, completely on-brand for Musk.

What was so striking to me – and why I made such bold predictions about Tesla’s ability to successfully execute on its vision for Optimus – was one simple, visible, demonstrable truth…

Tesla had already built fully autonomous robots capable of navigating and moving in the real world.

How did I know that? Because I rode in them.

Said another way, I was driven by Tesla’s self-driving software safely controlling its electric vehicles, on many occasions before that event, without having to lift a hand.

And what was Tesla’s electric vehicle? Nothing more than a robot on four wheels.

What everyone missed is that Musk and his team at Tesla had already cracked the hardest problem: creating the neural network, a synthetic brain designed and optimized for moving robots in the real world.

Which is why the videos that I’ll show you now were no surprise at all to me, but they are a surprise to most.

So much so that many are calling them “fake” or “sped up 2X” or “just CGI (computer graphics).”

And those are the nice comments.

They’re wrong.

Do the Optimus Slide

What you’ll see below is unaltered video, real speed, and ridiculously impressive.

Here’s Optimus displaying its ballet skills:

Source: Tesla

Or if that’s not your cup of tea, how about some shuffling?

Source: Tesla

Or how about some more modern dance?

Source: Tesla

Need some new moves for your next party?

Source: Tesla

It looks like Tesla’s latest generation of Optimus would outdance most humans on the dance floor, with an encyclopedic repertoire.

And here’s the kicker: Optimus’ neural network learned all of these dance moves in a computer simulation. Then that knowledge was zero-shot transferred to an Optimus, without any additional training. Wait! What??

This is a massive leap in artificial intelligence and robotics, and one that should be celebrated.

It’s amazing what an engineering background, subject matter knowledge, analytical skills, objectivity, critical thinking, an understanding of exponential growth, and curiosity can do for accurately predicting the future.

It wasn’t a joke, and it wasn’t horse shit.

As we approach the four-year mark of “human on stage in a spandex suit,” Optimus is – today – the most advanced autonomous humanoid robot in the world. It will soon transform the economy and our lives as we know them.

And Tesla is obviously gearing up to provide a more comprehensive update on its Gen 3 Optimus robot, which has already entered production.

Party on…

More to come very soon…

Jeff