Tesla's Optimus robots at 'We, Robot' event were not very autonomous

Tesla's main announcement coming from the company's recent "We, Robot" event was the Robotaxi (or the CyberCab, we're still not sure about the name). But perhaps the biggest impression was made by Tesla's updated Optimus robots, which freely walked among the crowd, talked to guests, served drinks, played games, and danced.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hyped up the robot, saying how it'll be "the biggest product of any kind, ever" and that it "can be a teacher, babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries. Just be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do."

But the company and its leader were (seemingly intentionally) ambiguous about what Optimus can really do autonomously right now.

At the event, it sure seemed like the robots could do a lot. In a particularly impressive demonstration, YouTuber Marques Brownlee played a game of charades with Optimus.

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And the way Optimus was behaving while serving drinks, interacting with people, and listening to instructions and executing them right away, seemed a little too good to be true.

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Well, it now appears that it was a little too good to be true.

Electrek did some digging and found numerous clues that the Optimus robots present at Tesla's event were at least partly remote controlled. For example, tech guy Robert Scoble said a Tesla engineer told him that Optimus was run by AI "when it walked" — the part about talking having seemingly been omitted on purpose.

Perhaps the best clue comes from this video, in which the Tesla Optimus bot not only talks and behaves extremely similarly to a human, but also confirms that it's "assisted by a human" and "not yet fully autonomous."

Another clue comes from Musk himself, in a reply to an X post about the possibility of people with disabilities potentially making a living "by controlling an Optimus bot remotely making drinks for people, moving packages, or whatever else." To this, Musk replied "yeah."

It's a very Muskian thing to do: Bring the robots to an event, hype up how amazingly autonomous they'll be, but then be very shady about the fact that they're actually remotely controlled or assisted.

The problem with this approach is that it tells us very little about how far Optimus has progressed since it was just a human in a robot suit. Can it really talk, answer complex queries, react to visual cues from humans, serve drinks, and do household chores, or is this version still far off? We may find out at the next Tesla event. Then again, we may not.