Elon Musk Tweets About Optimus Gen 2
So Elon Musk tweeted going for a walk with Optimus. Now, Optimus is, of course, Tesla’s humanoid robot. The video shows it moving slowly around a room while a small group of people observes its movements. The video quickly gained traction, amassing tens of millions of views very rapidly. Optimus is part of Tesla’s AI and Robotic Division and uses an AI-first approach with the goal of the robot, as stated by Musk, to perform tasks that are repetitive or boring. The company recently revealed its latest robot, Optimus Gen 2.
Optimus Not Operating Autonomously Yet
In the previous video of Optimus folding shirts, Elon Musk clarified that the robot is not doing this autonomously yet, but he did say that that is the eventual goal. In this video, a couple of people pointed out that there may be a person in the background with what appears to be a remote control for the robot. However, as some channels that follow the development of this robot closely have pointed out, it doesn’t look like a remote because usually those have little rabbit ears that are sticking up or something like that to project a radio control. So, if it is a walking motion, it is also possible he’s just got a kind of safety mechanism that’s just like stop start, could be the EOP button.
Impressive Progress
What is certain is that he’s not controlling the entire robot with two thumbs. He may be the guy that’s like go stop or something like that, so he’s controlling it. It was noticed that Optimus does not seem to have a stop button on its back anymore. Very exciting and very impressive progress by Tesla, Elon Musk, and everybody else involved with the project.
Figure AI’s Funding and Partnerships
Figure AI is also in talks with Microsoft and OpenAI for funding, hoping to secure a $500 million funding round, with Microsoft expected to invest approximately $995 million and OpenAI contributing around $5 million. This would put the Figure AI valuation at nearly $2 billion. The company has also signed a commercial agreement with BMW to deploy its autonomous humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing environments. This partnership aims to automate difficult, unsafe, and tedious tasks of the manufacturing process at BMW’s manufacturing facility in South Carolina.
Nvidia’s Innovations in Robotics
Dr. Lingshi Jin Fan, a senior research scientist at Nvidia, and the lead of AI Agents Initiative, recently put out a video that builds further on his impressive robotic research. He talks about the development of the Foundation Agent, a model that can learn to act in different worlds or realities. The agent has the ability to master diverse simulated realities and potentially generalize to our physical world. The breakthroughs in using AI to train robots in simulation, such as with Nvidia’s Isaac Jim and their sister project Isaac Sim, show incredible innovation in the robotic space.
This is arguably the biggest thing in robotics that has been seen in the last year. The future of robotics and AI is certainly very exciting and promising.
