Elon Musk’s bizarre demo exposed the truth of many tech reveals: They are a storyboarded vision of the future held together by digital duct tape.
THE ROBOT WAS not at all real. Or it was very real, depending on whether you believe realness is closely related to physiology or whether you think this whole reality is a simulation. Which is to say, the robot was actually a human cosplaying as a humanoid robot.
The robot shuffled on stage during Tesla’s AI Day yesterday afternoon, a three-hour demo of autonomous car features and slides titled “Multi-Scale Feature Pyramid Fusion.” The big news out of the event was a new custom AI chip for data centers, and a supercomputing system called Dojo. Later in the livestream, Tesla founder and chief executive officer Elon Musk revealed that Tesla was working on this robot. People tuned in, because Musk. Then they laughed, because of the robot. But the joke was on them.
