On September 30th local time in the United States, Tesla held the 2022 AI Day event in Palo Alto, California. Tesla CEO O Elon Musk and Tesla engineer team appeared at the venue and brought the world's first debut of the prototype of the Tesla Bot humanoid robot "Optimus". This humanoid robot that uses the same origin as Tesla Automobile technology, will take the lead in leading us into the long-awaited "next generation".
From The first industrial revolution to the present, human life has undergone earth-shaking changes. From riding a carriage to driving a car, from kerosene lamps to electric lamps, from reading a vast sea of books to easily obtaining various information through the Internet... Every technological progress has led mankind into a new era, and people are curious about when the era of artificial intelligence will come.
In fact, looking back at the past, we can find that facial recognition technology, voice and text conversion, content recommendation mechanism, sweeping robots, etc. have long subtly affected our lives - in fact, human beings have long been in the era of artificial intelligence.
. The reason why people do not enter the new era is because people expect artificial intelligence. In addition to the requirements for application methods, they also want to see "human figures" rather than machines in terms of form, which can be more integrated into human life scenes. Humanoid robots have greater significance in both technological, economic, social and human spiritual levels.
Use Tesla's automotive homologous artificial intelligence technology to create a truly landable humanoid robot
In fact, before Tesla, many manufacturers have released humanoid robot products, but only Tesla has brought a stronger sense of "reality".
Because Tesla CEO Elon Musk said: "We need to mass-produce robots at very high reliability and very low cost, which is very important." He predicts that Optimus may be available in mass production in 3-5 years, with output of millions, and it will be much cheaper than cars, with the estimated final price of robots below $20,000.
Currently, most manufacturers have either too high a cost to mass-produce, or have miscarried due to the investment of bottomless pits. For example, the cost of humanoid robots recently released by domestic manufacturers is as high as 700,000 yuan to mass-produce, while the cost of Japanese ASIMO is as high as more than 20 million yuan. Many of the technologies used by
Optimus are common to Tesla cars, such as scene construction, visual recognition, etc., and use the same neural network learning technology as Tesla FSD (full autonomous driving capability). Tesla's accumulation in artificial intelligence not only gives Tesla vehicles more technical potential than other brand products, but also allows Optimus to move from concept to reality in just a few months. This time on AI Day, Tesla not only brought Optimus prototype, but also showed the version that will be put into production. This means that in a few years, ordinary people like you and me have their own humanoid robot no longer exists in their imagination. It is not an expensive toy, but a partner who can truly serve us.
Now Optimus' prototype machine can now flexibly lift the kettle in the office to water the flowers, carry the materials with both hands to the target position, accurately locate the surrounding people and actively avoid them. According to media reports, Optimus has begun to put in simple work at Tesla's Fremont factory.
Human form will give robots more possibilities. Smart cars have allowed artificial intelligence technology to be widely used. Once humanoid robots enter the market in large quantities like smart cars today, artificial intelligence will truly face the scenarios faced by humans, cleaning, cooking, learning, leisure, parenting, elderly care... A broader world is unfolding in the artificial intelligence industry.
Musk said: "The essence of AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) is emergence." A sharp increase in the number of individuals in a system will cause a group to suddenly appear as features that were not previously unavailable, and this phenomenon is emergence. Life and intelligence are the result of emergence. The signals conveyed by a single neuron are extremely limited and cannot even be interpreted. However, tens of billions of neurons are superimposed together to form human "intelligence".Artificial intelligence is developing at an exponential speed. After passing a certain " singularity ", perhaps intelligence close to humans can "emergate" and then, artificial intelligence will usher in its "complete body".
understands the world from a human perspective and goes deeper into more scenarios
In order to make Optimus closer to humans, Tesla has made many efforts in the past year to combine the software and hardware technologies used in cars with robots. The robot's torso is equipped with a 2.3 kWh, 52V battery pack, which is highly integrated with charging management, sensors and cooling systems, which can support the robot to work all day. "This means that from sensor integration to charging management, it is all brought together into this system, which is also a reference to our experience in automotive design." Tesla engineers said.
Optimus has a total of 28 structural actuators in the body, the joints are designed with bionic joints, and the hands are drawn from biological design, with 11 degrees of freedom. In terms of "sensory", after the practical application verification of the fully autonomous driving capability (FSD) system, Tesla's powerful computer vision can be directly applied to robots. Optimus's "brain" uses the same chip as the Tesla vehicle, which supports Wi-Fi, LTE links and audio communication, allowing it to process visual data, make action decisions based on multiple sensor inputs, and support communication and communication systems. The security guarantee of system software and hardware has been improved again.
At the same time, Optimus also "learned" humans through motion capture , and the form of interaction with the world is more humane. Taking moving items as an example, Tesla staff enter actions through wearable devices, and the robot learns through neural network , from completing the same action at the same location to evolving to deduce the scheme in other scenarios, thus learning to carry different objects in different environments.
At present, Optimus can complete actions such as walking, going up stairs, squatting, and picking objects. It has actuators that can withstand heavy objects such as pianos weighing about half a ton, as well as flexible hands that can complete high-precision actions such as light and thin objects grabbing, operating mechanical devices, and complex gestures.
Musk said that what Tesla wants to do is a "useful" product: "We hope to help more people and improve work efficiency through products like Optimus. As time goes by, we will consider how to change our products in the future."
focuses on artificial intelligence security and is the first to set standards for the industry
Like cars, Tesla also adheres to the concept of "design is safety first" and improves robot safety based on car safety simulation and analysis capabilities. In traffic accident simulation, Tesla improves safety performance through software optimization and improvement of vehicle collapse and battery protection. In robot design, Tesla also ensures Optimus' ability to protect itself and people around it in the same way. For example, in external situations such as falls and collisions, the robot will make decisions consistent with humans - giving priority to ensuring the safety of the "brain" to the greatest extent, followed by the safety of the trunk battery pack. During the Q&A session of
AI Day, Musk also pointed out the security issues of artificial intelligence. "Artificial intelligence security is very critical," he said. "Artificial intelligence security should have better supervision at the government level, and corresponding regulatory agencies should be established. Anything that may affect public safety needs such supervision."
Like automobiles, aircraft, food and drugs, which "will affect public safety" fields, there are already relatively complete regulatory methods. Musk believes that artificial intelligence also needs similar measures: "We need to have a referee role to ensure that AI is safe for the public."
Artificial intelligence security does not have a unified standard at present. Optimus' mass production will prompt the industry, various departments and institutions to accelerate the formulation of standards and take the lead in providing reference samples.
creates the "world's strongest supercomputer" and leads the industry's development
Smart cars In order to achieve safe and reliable autonomous driving, the training data required is unimaginable. In humanoid robots that deal with more complex scenarios, stronger training computing power, larger-scale data training and analysis are needed. How to solve the problem and process these data faster determines the development speed of artificial intelligence.
Tesla's self-developed Dojo supercomputer will be competent for this task. Tesla realized the importance of high computing power and high-efficiency chips from the very beginning. Tesla engineers said: "We want Dojo supercomputer to become the world's strongest supercomputer system in artificial intelligence training."
Currently, Tesla has achieved a 30% training speed improvement in code and design alone. For example, through automatic labeling technology, Tesla has greatly improved the labeling speed of training scenarios. Using only one training module consisting of 25 D1 chips can achieve the performance of 6 GPU Boxes, and the cost is lower than that of one GPU Box. Only the computing power of 4 Dojo supercomputer cabinets can achieve automatic labeling performance of 72 GPU cabinets.
The first thing that benefits from efficient neural network training is the development of Tesla FSD, and its software has gradually matured at the technical level. In recent version updates, FSD has become increasingly human-like like humanoid robots, handling driving scenarios in a way that is closer to human responses.
For example, in an unprotected left turn scenario, if a vehicle turns right opposite the intersection, a vehicle goes straight to the right on the intersection, and a person is walking on the zebra crossing on the left, the FSD system will give a variety of solutions: accelerate and turn left before the pedestrian and vehicle; wait for the pedestrian and the right turn vehicle to pass, turn left before the vehicle on the right passes; or wait for the pedestrian and vehicles on both sides to pass before turning left. In the past, FSD might have adopted the first more radical approach, but now it will choose the second approach that is gentler and natural and in line with the minds of most human drivers. This is also a reflection of artificial intelligence security.
Tesla said it will arrange the first batch of 10 Dojo supercomputer cabinets in the first quarter of 2023, that is, ExaPOD with computing power exceeding 1.1EFLOPS, and its automatic labeling capacity will be increased by 2.5 times. In the future, Tesla will arrange 7 such clusters in Palo Alto to provide unimaginable huge computing power, speed up the development of autonomous driving and humanoid robots, and lead the development of the industry.
liberates labor and changes the fate of mankind
The changes brought about by autonomous driving in the transportation industry are revolutionary, and transportation production efficiency can be increased by at least one order of magnitude or even more. Robots will have greater significance to society and will change the destiny of mankind.
Musk said: "When talking about robots, we will think of economic development. The fundamental factor of the economy is labor. If we can use robots to achieve lower labor costs, it will eventually lead to faster economic development."
The fourth industrial revolution of represented by artificial intelligence is in full swing. As the most ideal hardware platform for artificial intelligence, humanoid robots will accelerate the liberation of labor in the first and second industries, while accelerating the liberation of labor in the first and second industries, it will also release a large proportion of the labor force in the third industry. The labor shortage caused by low birth rate and aging will be solved.
Not only that, in the future, with the participation of robots, people can freely choose their work, among which simple repetitive work can be handed over to robots. This type of work will become an option for humans, rather than a necessity. More people can enter more valuable areas of mankind - creation, research and development, charity, people's livelihood... to move mankind to a higher level of scientific and spiritual civilization.
With the support of Dojo supercomputer, Tesla will develop rapidly in the fields of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots, and the artificial intelligence technology closest to us is FSD, which has been launched on Tesla cars. Compared with Tesla cars that use homologous artificial intelligence technology and have truly entered life, Optimus, a humanoid robot that is "close to mass production" that is "close to large-scale mass production" will still take several years to truly meet us, because Tesla has adopted a very cautious attitude to ensure that it brings reliable and safe products.
Musk said: "I hope we can make Optimus benefit mankind very cautiously and bring what we need to our civilization and human nature. I believe this is very clear and very important." When humanoid robots enter thousands of households, in the future, humans may no longer have to run around for survival, but instead devote themselves to things they really love.
At that time, what we will remember will be the art that touches the soul, the technology that promotes social progress, and the good deeds that show the shining of human nature, rather than environmental pollution, waste of resources, struggle for interests, war, poverty... A better new world may eventually come.
