The chief of American electric carmaker Tesla says the company aims to complete a humanoid robot by next year. Elon Musk said last week that the robot, called Tesla Bot, will be designed to perform jobs that people do not like to do. "It's intended to be friendly," Musk joked, "and navigate through a world built for humans."
He added that the human-like machine would be based on the same artificial intelligence (AI) technology that Tesla uses in its automobiles. This includes a complex system of cameras and other devices to help the robot operate in real-world situations.
The robot's appearance came after a 90-minute presentation detailing some of the artificial intelligence upgrades driving Tesla's electric vehicles, including the Dojo supercomputer, which helps train cars to navigate city streets without human assistance. "It makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form," Musk said.
One particular slide said the Tesla Bot would eliminate "dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks," and Musk provided an example, suggesting the robot could be told to "go to the store and get the following groceries." Not that such a task is particularly dangerous, but you might find it repetitive and boring.
In the Full Self-Driving (FSD) chip designed by Tesla that is the heart of Autopilot HW3.0, there are about half a dozen instruction sets that are executed billions of times. These are replaced by dedicated circuits that make the Tesla FSD chip faster than any chip not designed to run the Tesla Neural Network.
It's hard to say how far off such a future might be, but there's a vast gap between showing off a few PowerPoint slides and delivering an actual, working humanoid robot.