It’s been a little over a year since Elon Musk trotted a person in a spandex suit out on stage and called them a prototype robot. Now, he’s teasing that we’ll actually get to see one of his many, many promises escape the vapour at tonight’s Tesla AI Day. Or, at least, he says we’ll see enough of the robot for him to recruit talent that can actually translate his big brain goals into physical reality.
Regardless, the event’s bound to be filled with either excitement or schadenfreude, depending on your leanings. So, how do you actually tune in to it?
How to watch Tesla AI Day
Despite most of our info on Tesla AI Day coming from guerilla marketing on Musk’s Twitter, the Tesla and Boring Company CEO clearly wants us to take it more as an industry event than a commercial. With that in mind, Tesla’s been coy about how to watch it remotely. Just this morning, the company finally posted a stream to its YouTube, which is set to begin around 6:15 PT/9:15 ET.
A ticket for the in-person event, posted to Twitter and spotted by Digital Trends, says doors open in Palo Alto at 5 PM PT and will stay open until 11 PM PT. We doubt the stream’s going to last quite that long, though don’t be surprised if it runs into the three hour mark.
What to expect from Tesla AI Day?
The imagery for the event has all focused on the Tesla Bot’s hands, with the Tesla twitter account even posting a gif of the robot, codenamed Optimus, forming its individual fingers into a heart shape.
AI Day tomorrow pic.twitter.com/oVenZDbVMQ
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 30, 2022
With that in mind, we’ll probably learn more about the company’s intentions for the robot, and perhaps even see a prototype. Like, an actual one this time.
Given that Musk is already hedging that AI Day is, first and foremost, a recruitment event, we could also just see renders and specs. That’s the thing with guerilla marketing, especially from a man who trotted out a modern day Mechanical Turk at last year’s AI Day and plans for a 1950s drive-in movie theatre cum charging station in 2018. It’s hard to get hard data until, and sometimes even a little bit after, it’s staring you in the face.
That said, Musk also made some pretty outlandish claims just yesterday that the company’s upcoming Cybertruck would be “waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat.” Yes, even in “seas.” We’ve seen his Cybertruck promises fall flat before, specifically when the truck’s supposedly almost bulletproof windows got shattered live onstage when confronted with a couple of lightly tossed steel balls. Still, given the tweets’ timing, it’s possible we’ll see another attempt at a demo tonight. Put the Cybertruck in a dunk tank, Elon.
Aside from Optimus and Cybertruck, Musk also posted last week that his self-driving car AI team (which is also working on Optimus) has “end-of-month” deadlines for “(actually smart) summon/autopark,” so folks are also expecting the event to go into self-driving tech as well. Tesla’s autopilot feature is under federal investigation.
We’ll be following the event tonight, so check back on Gizmodo later this evening to see if the Tesla Bot is more than a costume this time. Musk says the bot is designed to “eliminate dangerous, boring, and repetitive tasks,” so maybe one day, it’ll be able to watch these streams for us.