Elon Musk’s Optimus Robots are currently Looney Tunes slapstick disasters. But there’s a massive effort behind the scenes to make sure they don’t stay clumsy clankers forever.
Enter Tesla’s secret lab at its engineering headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where according to a new scoop from Business Insider, its goal is to record practically every mundane human movement imaginable, performed hundreds of times each day by a tireless crew of dozens of workers.
The AI industry is as much powered by armies of human grunts who work behind the scenes to make the tech appear seamless as it is by the actual gigawatts of energy consumed by its enormous data centers. So-called “data annotators” spend hours manually labelling the text and imagery contained in mountains of training data so that the AI knows what it’s looking at.
Now, with Optimus’s lab, we have “data collectors,” who themselves constitute the dataset. Their motions are captured by five cameras mounted on a helmet they wear, along with a cumbersome backpack that weighs up to 40 pounds. They do everything from lifting a cup to wiping a table to vacuuming to organizing vehicle with parts on a conveyor belt — to more questionable requests, per BI, like doing the “Chicken Dance” and twerking.
It’s like being a “lab rat under a microscope,” a former data collector at the lab told BI. The work is grueling and requires doing the same action an extraordinary number of times; employees often starting by wiping down a table, sometimes for weeks before they get to move on. In each eight hour shift, they’re expected to create at least four hours of usable footage. And if their movements are deemed not “human enough,” they can be penalized.
“You take a step, wipe the table, go into a reset pose, and do it all over again,” another former worker told BI. It’s “rinse and repeat until break time.”
Robots are a major part of Musk’s bold move of pivoting Tesla away from making cars to pioneering automation, which in theory could bring an astronomical amount of money if the gamble pays off. Humanoid robots that could assist with household tasks are projected to one day be a multitrillion dollar market, even though it’s not clear who would be buying them. Nonetheless, leaders in the industry, like the AI robotics firm Figure and the Shanghai-based Agibot, claim that they’re on the verge of being able to ship thousands of these yet-incredibly-experimental machines, which is just the prelude to them selling in numbers to rival car sales.
Musk has set a particularly pressing deadline, with an internal goal that Tesla will have 5,000 Optimus robots ready by the end of this year. On a recent third-quarter earnings call, BI notes, Musk said that Optimus “has the potential to be the biggest product of all time,” prognosticating that Tesla will eventually build one million units per year.
Recent Optimus demonstrations — the ones that didn’t rely on AI mimicry or human teleoperation — have done the opposite of making a good impression. In a video taken by Mark Benioff in September, the Salesforce CEO asks an Optimus for a Coke. But the bot, with Musk watching on, responds with significant delays, cuts out mid-sentence, and freezes in place, unresponsive. Once it finally begins to move, its movements are clearly clumsy and uncoordinated.
This might be why Tesla is gunning to collect as much movement data as possible, no matter how redundant seeming, perhaps hoping to emulate the breakthrough the AI industry had once it was able to train its generative models on ungodly amounts of training data.
Some of the tasks the data collectors perform are so simple they’re like “teaching a baby,” a former worker told BI. Two others said they were asked to complete brain teasers for actual babies, like putting shapes in the correct hole.
Some of their requests are AI-generated, resulting in bizarre tasks like acting like a gorilla, pretending to golf, and dancing provocatively. Two workers said they felt uncomfortable after the AI requests required them to crawl on all fours or remove clothing.
It sounds like this training still has a long way to go. Certainly Tesla doesn’t sound confident in the bot’s abilities, because they’re remotely teleoperated by a human whenever Musk brings over an investor to impress.
“The investors want to see the bots moving in action,” one former worker told BI. “When we’re in mo-cap, we’re controlling the bots so it looks more fluid.”
“It felt like theater,” they added.
More on robots: Disastrous Video Shows Robot Trying to Cook, Destroying Interior of House
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