Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as “much more than an electric car company.” On Thursday’s Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including a humanoid robot that Tesla is building. Tesla AI Day, which started after a rousing 45 minutes of industrial music pulled straight from “The Matrix” soundtrack, featured a series of Tesla engineers explaining various Tesla tech with the explicit goal of recruiting the best and brightest to join Tesla’s vision and AI team and help the company go to autonomy and beyond.
“There’s a tremendous amount of work to make it work, and that’s why we need talented people to join and solve the problem,” said Musk. Like both “Battery Day” and “Autonomy Day,” the event on Thursday was streamed live on Tesla’s YouTube channel. There was a lot of super technical jargon, but here are the top four highlights of the day.
Tesla Bot: A real humanoid robot
This bit of news was the last update to come out of AI Day before audience questions began, but it’s undoubtedly the most interesting. After the Tesla engineers and executives talked about computer vision, the Dojo supercomputer, and the Tesla chip (all of which we’ll get to in a moment), there was a brief interlude where what appeared to be an alien go-go dancer appeared on the stage, dressed in a white body suit with a shiny black mask as a face. It turns out, this wasn’t just a Tesla stunt, but rather an intro to the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot that Tesla is building
When Tesla talks about using its advanced technology in applications outside of cars, we didn’t think he spoke about robot slaves. That’s not an exaggeration. CEO Elon Musk envisions a world where human drudgery like grocery shopping, “the work that people least like to do,” can be taken over by humanoid robots like the Tesla Bot. The bot is 5’8″, 125 pounds, can deadlift 150 pounds, walk at 5 miles per hour and has a screen for a head that displays essential information. It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans,” said Musk. “We’re setting it such that at a mechanical and physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it.
