2:47 PM PDT · October 14, 2024 During Tesla’s “We, Robot” event last week, which TechCrunch covered late into the night, sources on the ground sent me a handful of videos of the automaker’s Optimus humanoid robots walking around the party, dancing, mixing drinks, and talking to guests. Most, if not all, of those who attended the affair are Tesla investors and fans, and so it wasn’t surprising that the messages I received alongside the videos included glowing comments about how advanced the bots were. I asked one investor, who sent me a video of an Optimus doing different voices on command, whether he thought it was remote controlled, or if it was perhaps, incredibly, powered by Grok, the AI chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI. He told me he thought it was indeed Grok enabling the bot to converse with him. Did he ask the bot how it was able to talk to him? No, he said. He was too blown away. That appears to have been the point for Tesla – to inspire awe in a vision of the future. Others, including myself, were not as dazzled by what seems to have been sleight-of-hand at an event designed to engender enthusiasm among investors and fans. Bloomberg, The Verge, and other outlets have reported that the bots were being remotely operated by humans, a conclusion that is easy enough to arrive at considering that they all had different voices and their responses and hand gestures were immediate and synchronized. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas also wrote in a report that the bots “relied on tele-ops (human intervention).” Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that while the Optimus prototypes were able to walk without external control using AI, employees stationed remotely oversaw many of the interactions between the bots and attendees during the “We, Robot” event. At least one video from the event displayed an Optimus bartender acknowledging that it was being “assisted by a human.” Techcrunch event