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- 🤖 Tesla's Optimus and the future of air combat
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
Tesla’s robot takes its first steps
The future of air-to-air combat
Tesla reveals Optimus robot
While much of the focus of Tesla’s investor day was on Elon’s plans for transitioning the world to sustainable energy, one of the more interesting takeaways from the presentation was the progress that Tesla has made on their robots.
Tesla’s Optimus Robot
Elon said that building the robots proved to be more challenging than expected as they required custom engineered gearboxes and motors, a task that was given to the same team that engineers components for Tesla cars.
And while building the robots is no easy task, providing them with the intelligence to autonomously perform useful tasks is the real challenge, yet Elon is confident that this is where Tesla will shine.
“We’re the most advanced in real world AI,” Elon said during the demonstration.
“The same AI that drives our cars will drive the robot, and for practical purposes, what this means is that we should be able to bring an actual product to market at a scale that is useful far faster than anyone else.”
Elon also mused about the potential market size for robots, foreshadowing a time where there are more robots than humans on the planet.
“You start getting into interesting questions, like whats the ideal ratio of humans to humanoid robots, and I think it might be greater than one to one.”
And as to how Elon see’s the robots playing into the future of Tesla, he believes that the robots are a much bigger opportunity than many people realize.
According to Elon, Tesla robots are “probably the least understood or appreciated part of what we’re doing at Tesla, but will probably be worth significantly more than the cars long term.”
You can check out a demo of the Optimus robots on YouTube here.
Fighter pilots of the future
As the capabilities of A.I. continue to expand beyond human abilities, military’s around the world have begun testing the technology in order to advance the effectiveness of their weapons systems.
One area that has shown significant promise is in flying military aircraft, where A.I. piloted fighter jets are able to transcend the physical limitations of a human.
The Chinese Air force recently conducted a one-on-one combat exercise in a real world setting, pitting an aircraft controlled by a human against an aircraft controlled by A.I., and the A.I. showed complete dominance and superiority throughout the exercise.
“The era of air combat in which artificial intelligence will be the king is already on the horizon,” said the project team in a recent paper.
Chinese J20 Fighter
One limitation that human pilots have traditionally faced in air-to-air combat is the extreme G-forces that can cause a human to lose consciousness, yet computers face no such problem.
And on top of being able to push aircraft beyond the limits of the human body, the reaction speed of the A.I. controlled aircraft is vastly superior.
“Aircraft with autonomous decision-making capabilities can completely outperform humans in terms of reaction speed,” Huang’s team said. “With superior calculation ability it can more accurately predict the development of the battle to gain the initiative in the confrontation.”
The United States Air force conducted a similar simulation back in 2020, which put F-16 fighter jets controlled by some of the most experienced military pilots up against an A.I. system, and the A.I. system came out on top in all five of the dogfight scenarios.
And while A.I. is able to outperform human pilots by a significant margin in dog-fighting exercises, because of the complexities of modern warfare, the finite onboard computing power of current generation A.I. limits the capabilities of the technology.
“The problem of aircraft air combat confrontation is very complex with high dynamics, strong real-time characteristics and a larger solution space,” Huang’s team said. “This poses a huge challenge to the real-life realization of intelligent decision-making.”
And while Huang’s team noted that some technical challenges still remain, the dogfighting exercis “proved the engineering feasibility of AI piloting technology,” meaning that its only a matter of time before A.I. replaces human fighter pilots entirely.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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