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.
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.