Tesla’s AI is growing in popularity over time, with millions of people watching its live broadcast.
Investors and potential investors are watching to learn about new ways Tesla is trying to make money. Technology enthusiasts are watching Tesla to see how far the company will go to introduce new and exciting advancements.
Some people watch because they know Elon Musk’s appetite for spectacle innovations.
Whatever the motivation, we can expect some shocks and the introduction of new concepts on September 30, 2022.
We expect four reports on Tesla’s performance. Below are our expectations for Tesla AI Day 2022.
Optimus: The project was presented for the first time at last year’s Artificial Intelligence Day. It arrived with much fanfare, as expected from Elon Musk, and received extensive international press coverage.
The dancing and shiny costumes of the humanoid figure gave the impression of a major advance in robotics, but it soon became clear that the figure was actually a man in a robot suit.
However, Musk continued, “The idea was to build a humanoid robot capable of performing many of the mundane, repetitive, or risky tasks of daily life, such as picking up groceries from shelves or performing routine maintenance in hazardous areas.”
On Artificial Intelligence Day last year, Tesla announced plans to produce a humanoid robot called Optimus, which Musk says is “friendly and navigates a world built for people.”
Tesla AI Day was originally scheduled to take place on August 19, but Musk pushed back the date in hopes of having a working Optimus prototype this week. On September 20, Musk reiterated his goal of having the prototype ready by the end of the month.
During Tesla’s Q1 earnings call this year, the celebrity executive told investors that the company is still working on a 5’8″ robot that relies on Tesla’s work in neural networks and its advanced Dojo supercomputer (more on that in a bit). Handling the work of human existence, which means everyday tasks like grocery shopping, Musk said at the time that Optimus would be “more valuable than the car business, more valuable than FSD.”
Full Self-Driving is the Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system which is certainly not fully autonomous but can handle some autonomous driving tasks for drivers willing to pay $15,000. Musk also said that without FSD, Tesla is “basically worth zero.”
At the opening of Tesla’s gigafactory in Austin in April, Musk said that Optimus and a new wave of products will be launched in 2023.
When it hits the stage, we expect Optimus to weigh about 125 pounds, walk about 5 mph, have a screen, and be weak enough for a human to defeat if the robot ever decides to use its mind to get the mind.
Unless Tesla’s AI team has moved very quickly to get this robot to perform human-like tasks, it seems unlikely that the consumer product will hit the market next year. And even if it was, would it be good?
Musk has promised that the solution to full self-driving is years away-in 2016 he said that Tesla was less than two years away from the “full autonomy” solution. FSD still lacks full self-driving capability, and these shortcomings are causing problems for Tesla. The automaker faces state and federal scrutiny over Autopilot, its smaller version of ADAS, and FSD, even as it expands access to the latter, as well as several lawsuits that claim Tesla falsely advertised the capabilities of its ADAS system.
