Tesla Shows Robots Serving Drinks and Chatting With Guests — but Doesn't Say People Were Controlling Them

At an event on a movie lot, Elon Musk unveiled a two-seat 'Cybercab' with no steering wheel and had humanoid Optimus robots tend bar and dance. Guests who talked to the robots came away suspecting, correctly, that humans were operating them remotely.

Tesla held an event tonight at a Warner Bros. studio lot in Los Angeles that Elon Musk called "We, Robot." He arrived in a Cybercab — a sleek two-seat car with no steering wheel or pedals — and said Tesla would build them for under $30,000 and have them driving themselves, without a person, in Texas and California next year. He has said versions of that every year since 2019. Then the humanoid robots came out.

About twenty Optimus robots walked among the guests, poured drinks at a bar, played rock-paper-scissors, and danced in a gazebo. Musk said they would eventually cost $20,000 to $30,000 and be "the biggest product ever of any kind" — a robot to do your chores. Guests who talked to them found the robots quick, witty, and fluent, with a range of different voices. Some asked directly whether a person was behind the voice; the robots gave joking non-answers. One said, "I might be some AI."

By the end of the evening, reporters and robotics researchers had concluded what Tesla did not say from the stage: the robots were being remotely operated, at least in part, by people. The walking may have been autonomous; the conversation and the bartending almost certainly were not. Tesla's stock fell about 9 percent the next day, mostly over the lack of detail on the cars.

None of which makes the robots fake. Teleoperation is how every company in the field trains its machines. But an evening designed to make people believe they were talking to robots was, it turned out, an evening of people talking to people through robots — and the gap between the two is the entire question.