Tesla Optimus robots interacting with the public at an event in October were not fully autonomous

The October presentation of the Tesla Cybercab two-seater taxi was accompanied by a demonstration of the company’s progress in creating humanoid robots, Optimus, which were present in decent numbers at the event, imitating the behavior of people and interacting with them. One even poured beer for the guests, but later it turned out that he did not act entirely independently.

Such conclusions were reached by the Gizomodo resource, quoting blogger Robert Scoble, who was invited to the Tesla presentation. The latter’s attention at the event was predictably attracted by a copy of Tesla Optimus in a cowboy hat, which poured beer into glasses and served them to the guests. At first, the blogger began to elicit information about the presence of animated assistants in the robot during the dialogue, but the machine did not give a clear answer. The guest of the event did not stop and later asked a similar question to a Tesla engineer. As it turned out, artificial intelligence actually controlled the Optimus robots present at the event, but in some cases they were assisted by remote operators.

At least the latter were not visible to the public, which is not the case with Tesla’s January attempt to convince audiences that the Optimus robot had learned to fold a T-shirt on its own. Then vigilant viewers discovered a duplicate manipulator in the video, which was controlled by a person, teaching the robot to make certain movements. The extent to which the robots demonstrated by Tesla this week were autonomous is not entirely clear, but they still have some help from people.