Tesla's beer-serving Optimus robot was controlled by a human the entire time

Tesla's big autonomy event last night focused largely on the topic two-seater cybercab And Art Deco city bus Robovanbut the company also talked about some updates for Optimus – The painfully slow robot Elon Musk hopes so a never-ending cash glitch for the company. At the event's afterparty, Optimus was heavily featured as a bartender and dancer, but it turned out that the bot itself wasn't doing anything. Tesla employees controlled it remotely the entire time.

Robert Scoble, an AI enthusiast who attended the event, posted a video on Twitter showing Optimus pouring drinks and waving to attendees. A second video in which Scoble has a conversation with the operator of the bot and directly addresses the question of whether Optimus did something autonomously at the party. The answer seems clear NO.

The fact that Optimus was able to hold a conversation on his own is a sign that the bot was primarily controlled remotely. The voice that responds to Scoble's questions, seemingly coming from an onboard speaker, doesn't sound generated by AI – it's clearly a human operator somewhere behind the scenes. The answer itself says that there could Be some AI is not the kind of answer that comes from a company that likes to show off its latest advances in artificial intelligence. This is the kind of thing you say when you try to pretend you're using AI at all.

This robot, which so far appears to operate primarily via human remote control, remains Elon Musk's vision for the future of Tesla as a company. Since Musk's investor call, he has admitted that he sees this There is no limit to the amount of money people spend on robotsOptimus was his baby – much more than anyone else of the eugenicist actually human children. Maybe he believes that the robots will love him no matter how little he cares about them.