Elon Musk shared a new video on Saturday featuring Optimus Prime, the robot Tesla has been developing From 2021. But anyone who tries to watch the video will immediately notice something strange. The footage from Optimus Prime is low-quality and pixelated, looking like it was shot on a flip phone twenty years ago.
The new video was posted early Saturday morning and has been viewed more than 35 million times As of this writing. But the video shows Optimus Prime just walking around and not doing anything.That would be pretty impressive Around 2013 Presumably so, since it’s relatively difficult to make machines walk like humans, but it’s not entirely clear why Musk would want the world to see Optimus Prime walking like this.
Updated at 3:58 PM ET: Sometime in the past 30 minutes or so Elon Musk videos Has been replaced to include a higher resolution version. Oddly, edited tweets often display a note at the bottom stating that the tweet was edited and when it occurred, but Musk’s tweet did not indicate that anything had been changed.
The screenshots below show side-by-side what the tweet looked like before it was changed to include a higher-resolution video.
We’ve reached out to Twitter to see if Musk has special rules as the owner of the social media platform and will update this article if we hear back. The remainder of this article will be reserved for posterity.
Keeping technological achievements aside, why does this video look so bad? We’re not the only ones who noticed this weird pixelated quality, as many Musk fans joked about the blur.
“Was this shot with a potato?” one user quipped.
“Same photographer?” another X user quipped bigfoot photos.
Tesla did not immediately respond to questions about the new video of Optimus Prime emailed on Saturday.
Musk unveiled Optimus in the summer of 2021 with an unconventional speech that gave the impression that the billionaire was desperate to hype nearly anything to come.Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence Day that year didn’t feature an actual robot, but a man in a black and white suit walking around like a typical robot from before. Start dancing the jig.
Tesla’s robots have come a long way since their hilarious debut, but Optimus still has a long way to go before it can catch up to the cutting-edge robots of the 2020s. Atlas, a humanoid robot built by Boston Dynamics, sets out to learn how Get back on your feet in 2016stand Single leg in the same yeardoing Backflip 2017and obtained Parkour style jump 2018.
Atlas is still making progress in ways that rival how humans actually move.Last year, the Atlas robot demonstrated its ability to manipulate its environment Navigate a complex workplace.
Optimus has made improvements since it was first announced, but it still has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to the likes of Boston Dynamics. Arguably the most impressive thing we’ve seen Optimus Prime do is fold laundry, but if you look closely at the video, you’ll notice a guy standing off-screen mimicking the actions.Frankly, this is technology that works Since the 1960s.
Can Tesla develop a truly autonomous robot that can serve as a household servant like Musk? Committed? Only time will tell.But we’ve been waiting for that version of the future It has been more than a century. Robotics is hard. But we can certainly keep dreaming.