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Were the humanoid “robots” even real?

I saw some videos that seemingly showed them to just be remote controlled by a human, but I don’t research deeply enough on it to be confident that it was true.

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It's a mix, depending on what the task is, everything impressive is teleop. Which is fine in the abstract - all humanoids from all companies (there's probably like 3 dozen now) are either teleop, doing slow and cautious autonomy with limited scope or executing routines. This is simply how they must be developed - do some useful task with teleop and get data, train model, execute task unsupervised. It's all sensible except Tesla needs this to work at warp speed for their valuation to stay where it is, and it just won't. It's slow, expensive, and will take years to get that data flywheel spinning correctly, get people used to it etc. I just don't see it working on the timelines Tesla needs.

There's a big difference to end users between "a robot walking around my house doing something" and "a human remotely controlling a robot and walking around my house". The privacy and safety implications are huge, and I cannot imagine that Elon Musk has the remotest interest in letting those points be heard.

not to mention that they run out battery fast and cant really lift much.

They will never lift much. If they were strong enough to lift heavy objects they would be strong enough to kill you accidentally. There's no technology fix for that.

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