Tesla promised a robot. Is this just a recruitment promotion?

Tesla Recruitment The speech ended on Thursday night, when a man in a tight white suit with a black head wrapped onto the dark stage. Electronic music sounded, and the man began to walk towards Charleston. This person is a runner. The man shook their shoulders and extended his arms to the jazz hand. “Okay. Thank you,” the CEO Elon Musk After entering the freestyle for 40 seconds, he said a seemingly eternal word and ended the dance.

This person represents a robot, which Musk also calls Tesla Bot and Optimus (“sub-optimal,” he joked). One day—”sometime next year,” Musk said. Optimist forever-The prototype of the robot will perform “boring, repetitive and dangerous” tasks.Musk says robots will use the same advanced technology artificial intelligence Technology that may one day allow it The car drives itself-Although today they are limited to simple tasks such as changing lanes and navigating parking lots. Musk explained that robots will “have a profound impact on the economy.” Then he said bluntly: “Yes, join our team and help build it.”

The AI ​​Day speech on Thursday was broadcast on the Internet from a stage in Palo Alto, showing all the decorations before the prime time Tesla glasses, including crowds of fans, free flow of alcohol, and plenty of lighting gel. But AI Day is aimed at geeks, people who might make the company’s technology work. Think of the whole thing as a very fancy job fair.In the second minute of the slide presentation, Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy delved into the kind of speech that is usually limited to university classrooms and company conference rooms, and showed a schematic diagram Neural Networks on the screen. Just after the robot’s debut, another slide clarified the information and led the audience to a web page where engineers could apply for jobs. However, although the show ended after 11pm Eastern Time, nearly 1 million people watched the demo on Tesla’s YouTube channel.

In this way, AI Day may be an ur-Tesla event, combining clever experimental technology with the exaggerated stupidity of people wearing robotic suits to hype products that will not exist for a while. Tesla hopes that this combination will help it accomplish one of its most difficult tasks: attracting artificial intelligence engineers in a tight market.

Forget the previous promise in the previous speech.More than two years ago, Musk said there would be 1 million Tesla robot taxis hit the road By the end of 2020. But Tesla’s cars are still unable to drive by themselves. The technology relies on human drivers to supervise the actions of the machines on the road.At the same time, a new cutting-edge battery was introduced in detail for the first time Last September’s Battery Day event Musk said on the earnings call last month that the production rate has slowed down and may not be ready to launch the new Model Y later this year. This will further postpone Tesla’s promised cost reduction and its long-term promise of dreams. $25,000 electric car.

The presentation also avoids mentioning primary research Last week, federal regulators incorporated Autopilot into Tesla’s controversial advanced driver assistance function. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration pointed out that since 2018, there have been at least 11 incidents in which Tesla self-driving cars hit police, fire trucks or ambulances parked on the road, resulting in 1 death and 17 injuries . The company’s driver’s manual warns that the system may not be able to brake to secure the vehicle.Experts say These characteristics are trained Detect moving things, not moving things no Part of the move is to avoid false alarms that could lead to a sudden stop. If the investigation leads to a recall, it could affect more than 700,000 Model S, X, Y, and 3 vehicles on the road.