“The future should look like the future”, CEO Elon Musk said at the Tesla “We Robot” special event held in Burbank, California, earlier this week. Sure enough, Tesla’s much-anticipated autonomous robotaxi, the Cybercab, and its large-van counterpart, the Cybervan, seemed straight out of celebrated sci-fi movies.
But as the name of the event hinted at, a vision of the future would not be complete without robots: Several of the Optimus Gen 2, Tesla’s latest version of humanoid-like robot, were found serving drinks, holding conversations with guests, and even dancing at the event.
Tesla has recently pitched the Optimus as a potential replacement for factory workers in China and elsewhere. Musk previously said he expects the Optimus to start working at Tesla factories in 2025 and to be available to other firms in 2026.
Yet, at the event, the Tesla boss revealed his expanded vision of a household robot that can do “everything you want: Babysit your kid, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks”.
He also gave a closer estimate of the robot’s price tag: Once produced “at scale,” Optimus should cost somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000. Musk had previously said the robot’s price would be about half that of a car.
Staying true to his sci-fi vision, the Tesla CEO referred to Optimus as a cross between R2D2 and C-3PO, the famous droids from the Star Wars film series.
Ever since the first generation of the Optimus was revealed in 2022, Tesla has emphasized the continuity between its cars and the robot. “Everything that we’ve developed for our cars — the battery power’s electronics, the advanced motor’s gearboxes, the software, the AI inference computer — it all actually applies to a humanoid robot,” Musk said at the event. “A robot with arms and legs, instead of a robot with wheels.”
Tesla would not be the first to offer a domestic robot on the market. Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics has already commercialized a home service-type robot called Spot with a hefty price tag of $74,500. BMW and Open AI are backing robots made by Figure, a California-based company. Meanwhile, Nvidia is developing Project GR00T to also deliver humanoid robots.
Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs forecast that the annual global market for humanoid robots could reach $38 billion by 2035, with robot shipments of 1.4 million units both for industrial and consumer applications. It also said that robots could become more affordable as their manufacturing cost has been decreasing more than expected — leading to faster commercialization.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.