SpaceX has acquired xAI, the company announced on Monday, merging two of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies into the most valuable private company in the world.
SpaceX has acquired xAI, the company announced on Monday, merging two of Elon Musk’s most ambitious companies into the most valuable private company in the world.
Now he’s also retooling Tesla facilities to build his Optimus humanoid robots.
Who the hell is going to buy his stupid robots?
If they work, it’s going to be other corporations for factory work.
It’s going to be a long long time before any bot is good enough and cheap enough to be used at the consumer level in our homes.
If a factory can afford robots, they already have acquired it. Industrial robots excel at their work already due to them being extremely precise already. If you need transportation robots, there are already ones that euter run on embedded rails or are already fully self-driving using wheels. Humanoid robots solve no issues that the industry hasn’t already solved. It would just be a robot that would be less stable compared to any other transportation robot nor as precise as stationed ones while also more complex, and thus easier to break down, with the only upside it being that it’s more of a generalist, but that is also sort of a moot point because a human could do it still cheaper.
The real use case of humanoid robots is very niche, with it being in environment where classic robot models fails, that being an environment that cannot be modified for classic robot use (e.g. mountainous terrain) where flying is not a viable option. After all, the human body, and the bodies of quite a few animals, excel at climbing rough and steep terrain whereas most, if not all, currently commercially available robots fail at it, or at the very least do very poorly.
They seem so bad for factory work though? One of those robot arms would work so much better than some shitty humanoid robot.
The world is made for general purpose humans including vast amounts of factory space. There will always be things for a general purpose robot to do that’ll be cheaper than designing and manufacturing a low volume bespoke robot.
Like Amazon is trying and building robots to do a lot of picking, but they can’t even fully automate that.
It’s more a question of can they solve it (huge if) and even if they do, how many can they actually sell.
Not defending Musk, but the point of humanoid robots is to perform a job currently done by a human worker without modifying the process or tools. Dedicated robot arms are fantastic for factory work, but the jobs they do have to specifically be designed to be done by a robot arm.
As an example, you can’t put a robot arm at a human workspace and have it open a plastic bag, put an item inside it, and pick up a tape gun seal it with tape. For a robot arm to do that, the entire workspace, and extra robots would have to be added and programmed to accomplish the same task.