Comment by p-o 3 days ago
What makes this move even more incredulous is that none of the two market they want to move towards are proven markets:
- Waymo is generating less than 150m in 2025.
- Consumer robotics is an absolute unknown.
How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.
> Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations?
The answer to that is no, probably for the foreseeable future. The robot demos we have no can't even fold laundry or put dishes away without being teleoperated. Both extremely basic tasks that any household robot would be required to do, along with other messy jobs that put it at risk as you said: taking out the trash, feeding the pets, cleaning up messes, preparing or cooking food, etc.
The price it would have to cost with current tech would be astronomically more than just hiring a human, and they would almost certainly come with an expensive subscription as well, whereas I can hire a human to come in and clean my home weekly for about $200/month.
Also, how will these robots make money? They are a less capable human. Humans who aren't skilled don't make much money.
Humans who aren't skilled require training regardless of how "unskilled" the task is.
Humans that are chronically unskilled also don't learn well, somewhat as a rule.
Humans that don't make much money have a high turnover rate from burnout. Additionally, those that can learn typically leave for greener pastures.
The bar isn't terribly high. Efficiency of scale in production will solve this eventually. I think the likely outcome is robots building themselves first.
Almost all developed economies are running into a fertility crisis right now, with labor shortages already appearing in the frontrunners of the trend, such as Germany.
Human work is going to cost more in the future, and immigration from countries such as Thailand or Vietnam is already slowing down. Even a mediocre robot will be sought after if it is the only choice you have.
I understand that. It's my personal opinion that one of the causes of low birth rates is that we continually choose to have robots solve our problems instead of choosing a human.
I think we could increase birth rates by making a taxation scheme in which the most marginally effective way to solve a problem is with a human, paid a wage which allows for that occupation to be a lifelong career.
They’ll be bought/leased, providing direct profit. Also, there’ll be maintenance revenue. I think they’re expected to cost around $30K.
In the case where they’re replacing a low-skill human worker, they’ll pay for themselves in 1-2 years…plus no sick days, no drug use, no theft, and they can work 24 hours a day, less any recharging time.
Once large swaths of the planet have been rendered uninhabitable from human activity, we'll require them to continue extracting profit from those areas. (this is a downer comment but also realistically the first thing that came to mind when trying to think of a use for them).
I think if they are teleoperated they could make sense, or at least more than the device-local versions
A teleoperated robot is little more than a human worker with extra steps. (And an expensive, clumsy human worker at that.) I can't imagine many situations where that would make sense instead of having a human do the work in person.
I could see teleoperated help catching on. Americans are weird about staff. When I visit my old-world family, it's seen as perfectly normal to have someone living in an attached apartment, handling the cooking the cleaning, etc. There are well-established etiquette rules, understood both by the staff and the family, which help navigate the rather complicated, radically unequal relationship between the two.
Americans by and large don't do that. We software developers have not that different of an income gap between us and minimum wage workers compared to my family overseas and their staff. Yet, it would be considered weird, extravagant even, for a $300-500k/yr developer to have dedicated help. We're far more comfortable with people we don't need to interact with directly, like housecleaners, landscapers, etc.
Teleoperated robots sidestep that discomfort, somewhat, by obscuring the the humanity of the staff. It's probably not a particularly ethical basis for a product, but when has that ever stopped us.
Maybe you can scale to have one operator operate ten or a hundred household robots at a time.
An autonomous robot that has 99% reliability, getting stuck once an hour, is useless to me. A semi-autonomous robot that gets stuck once an hour but can be rescued by the remote operator is tempting.
Expect security and privacy in the marketing for these things, too, but I don't think that's a real differentiator. Rich and middle class people alike are currently OK with letting barely-vetted strangers in their houses for cleaning the world over.
There could be some compelling reasons for one.
- Services like maids or cleaners are usually scheduled, maybe you have to wait and open the door etc. Maybe they can't make it that day because of snow storm etc.
- Services are normally limited to certain hours. With a remote operator, the robot could do laundry all night ran by someone in a different time zone.
- If needed could be operated in shifts.
- Other new use cases could arise, e.g. wellness check on elderly, help if fallen or locked out etc.
The only places it does is where humans can't easily go: space, underwater, hazardous industrial sites, etc.
It can occasionally make sense for high skill stuff where the shortage is people who can even do it, like remote surgery.
In your house? That's silly. It'd be 100X more expensive and complicated than just hiring a housekeeper so you could... hire a remote housekeeper?
Yeah but with a teleoperated worker you can have them work remote from a place with poor labor regulations and extremely low pay.
The future with this as a reality is a really dark place, where the uber wealthy live entirely disconnected from the working class except through telepresent machines half a planet away. That way the wealthy don't have to be inconvenienced by the humanity of the poors.
Suddenly I think Musk is trying to turn Earth into Solaria.
If a robot can do basic cleaning, laundry, and dishes, that's worth a lot to a lot of people. Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
I don't think it actually is worth a lot to people. I know dual-professional households who don't even use their dishwasher consistently, and multiple companies have gone bankrupt trying to bring automated laundry folding (which does exist in industry) to the consumer market.
There are a lot of maid services that imply (to me) otherwise.
Robot vacuum with a mop, washing machine, tumble dryer and dishwasher reduce housework to like an hour per week, ie 30 min/person/week. This can be higher if you live in a big house, but if your marriage can’t tolerate 30 mins of house work a robot will not solve it.
> Dual-professional households have the money, and not having to do this housework could save some marriages.
Dual-professional households could hire a maid and pay for marriage counseling and still save money compared to a $20k robot plus whatever a subscription would run.
Maids are unaffordable in most rich countries that do not have access to ultracheap foreign labor or/and have stringent labor regs.
What do you consider affordable?
I can google "maid service seattle" and see dozens of entries. The first one in the yelp list is available to book and will clean a 1000 - 1500 sq ft, 2 bed, 2 bath house for well under $200. There's even a decent discount if you book is as a weekly or biweekly service.
That feels pretty affordable? I know it's a scale, but minimum wage here is $21/hr now.
I have enough time to take care of my own space, but for comparison Comcast internet is well over $120/month for crappy speeds. I think in comparison a little more than that for 1 deep cleaning a month is reasonable.
Nobody has yet demonstrated a stationary robot that can do these things.
They're all legs. The impressive demos are just show, not useful.
The first MVPs dont need to reach parity to human autonomy, they only need to enforce that humans do the cheap work.
They haven't said it explicitly. But the reason that Waymo can add five cities this year is very likely they are at least at break even on opex. They likely reached that point sometime last year and it seems to have held up.
So I wouldn't call robotaxi service unproven. But I would call the idea that you can claim to be running a robo taxi service without depots, cleaners, CSRs, and remote monitoring that can handle difficult situations in a more sophisticated way than each car having a human monitor it, naïve.
I read that as meaning even the scaled robotaxi service (Waymo) does not throw off enough cash to offset the loss of Tesla's vehicle sales unit. (The putative Tesla buyer they are dissuading from purchase would have to take a whole lot of robotaxi trips to generate the same amount of profit for Tesla. Assuming Tesla can get robotaxis working.)
In the 2000s publishing pivot to the Internet, this was known as "trading physical dollars for digital pennies."
Such is the law of the falling rate of profit, a general tendency of Capitalism.
A lot of the current valuation is based on Elon drumming up investor expectations. As they start to lose their spot as market leaders in EV, Tesla's inability to deliver on what Elon promised will become more clear as their competitors level with and surpass them.
Moving to new, unproven markets is fruitful ground for someone like Elon to drum up expectation and hopefully keep distracting people from the fact that he's had very few recent successes to show for all the hype he receives.
On top of that, despite huge investments of both time and money into both areas, seemingly rivaling competitors, Tesla does not seem to be anywhere close to a market leader in either segment. They have to both prove the markets and that they can compete in them.
EVs were a very unproven market when Tesla started and it was commonly accepted they didn’t have a hope in hell.
I think musk knows you gotta take risks and skate to where the puck is going, not where it is now.
If he’s wrong, it’s all over of course.
>Let alone the valuation.
Maybe that's the driver. I always figured keeping Musk on was a sort of suicide pact, without Musk the company might be more traditionally valued, but that means the stock would tank. So they have to stick with him.
Staying in autos, eventually folks figure out the math and the stock tanks ... so they have to keep moving and keeping that sort of aspirational stock price.
To be fair, market has been decoupled from reality on the ground for a while now. Just the fact that companies were able to operate giving stuff away for free only to suddenly yank the chain in a desperate bid to gain profitability later should be enough of a signal.
That said, as much as I dislike Musk ( and I have bet money against him before ), his instincts are likely not wrong. And it does help that, clearly, he knows how to bs well.
I am not saying you are wrong, but I think he is just a poster child for everything wrong with current market ecosystem.
Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.
That's the problem with robots like Optimus. The "specialized" part (Cutting the onions) is 1% of the skills. You'd still need to other hard 99% (Prehensility, vision, precise 3D movement, etc.).
And if you sorted the hard 99%, what's the point in specialising in cutting onions, when the same exact skills are needed to fold and put away laundry?
A million robots making $1k a month is $12b a year, but you need to actually produce the robots, maintain them, train the AI, own the data centers.
Also, if you take 1 million jobs, do you think that might cause demand to drop for services?
No, automation doesn't reduce jobs, i.e. doesn't reduce consumer spending, as consumer spending is determined by output, which automation boosts.
The savings from automation in a particular sector are spent elsewhere — wherever services are more costly (in labor). That's the dynamic behind Say's law, which shows that spending on less automatable jobs like barbers and physical therapists increases as automation reduces costs in other sectors of the economy.
I understand this is a well-developed economic theory and I am complete uninformed, but this doesn't make intuitive sense at all.
If 1 million prep cooks are replaced by robots, will food become cheap enough that those prep cooks can all get jobs as barbers, and the money people spend on food will shift to haircuts?
Will the food be so cheap that all those prep cooks can afford to learn to cut hair?
Also consider the money velocity of a human vs a robot. A human is probably paycheck to paycheck spending everything they earn. Robot earnings go back to company, which makes the stock go up, 90% of which is owned by billionaires who just keep hoarding and hoarding.
A general drop in services, yes. A drop in the services being provided by the robot, probably not. I doubt if many Prep Chefs are regularly eating at the restaurants they work at. When the robots are taking millions of jobs in all areas of service, there might be a problem.
> How can the transition be rationally justified? Let alone the valuation.
Musk seems to have successfully decoupled investors from results. The stock price seems to move far more based on what he says and does than what the company says and does. It's completely irrational. Tesla is a huge bubble.
Because it's hard and Tesla think they can do it.
See 'reusable rockets' and 'having paralysed people control things with their minds' for other examples.
HN often seem to think there's Elon fans downmodding things but it seems more like a case of irrational hatred.
Oh, well let me get in my sub-$30,000 Model S, with a swappable battery and full-self-driving capabilities, and take a fully automated trip to the Hyperloop downtown so I can catch a quick ride out to O’Hare so I can fly out to watch a successful Starship launch…
…oh wait. I can’t. Because for all his successes, Musk has also sowed quite a lot of bullshit that has gone precisely nowhere.
Just like to point out Hyperloop wasn’t intended for local transportation and isn’t a Musk company, just some BOE speculation (BON?) that others have pursued.
maybe? Tesla is the biggest reason there are any electric vehicles on the road today, I haven't heard of anyone (knowledgeable) who has even hinted otherwise. I can understand not liking Elon, but trashing the companies he's formed and the marvels they've created is just proof you don't value a truthful understanding of the world.
'having paralysed people control things with their minds' would be great if you guys had a healthcare system that would pay for it.
To be clear, Neuralink has shown some promising signs. Has also shown some terrible signs.
And then I don't know if Musk is oversimplifying for a soundbite or more of his Dunning Kruger, but some of the descriptions seem to lack any knowledge of neurology. He describes a universal chip that will do different things and solve different issues depending on what part of the brain it's implanted in. That's not how it works at all.
So?
They could make the first working flying cars. They could work fantastically.
And maybe one they release them we find out… no one wants flying cars. They sell 500 a year despite only costing as much as a normal car.
Just because you can figure out how to do something doesn’t mean you’re going to make money at it.
Where did I say that?
I was using the classic idea of the flying car as an example of a thing that has been out of reach as an as a product for normal people and may not actually be successful if it were to really be sold.
Replace flying car with whatever example you want.
To put it in a different way, you could be so busy figuring out how to do it that you don’t figure out that a business case doesn’t actually exist.
I wasn’t trying to comment on any of Musk‘s other companies specifically. Only that we don’t know if making robots will actually make money.
If this were the case Waymo would already be gone. Tesla, under Musk, has missed a big opportunity. The claims of FSD "next year", by Musk for the past decade, fall on deaf ears now. While Waymo was focusing on building it Musk was multi-tasking and letting Tesla falter. RIP Tesla and what could have been. The reality is more clearly that Tesla could have been an amazing EV platform in totality. Instead they are being beaten in: driverless, PSD/FSD, and home energy production & storage. The only thing Tesla has a real lead in is still their EV power distribution footprint. I wouldn't be surprised to see that sold off in the next 5 years given their direction.
If Waymo didn't exist, we'd instead be lauding the progress of Wayve, Pony, and WeRide.
At this point, Tesla have the potential to be at best maybe #5 globally. No wonder they're so desperate to hide behind a tariff wall in their home market.
And yet Tesla's FSD v14 critical disengagement rate is behind where Waymo was over a decade ago, when Waymo first started reporting this figure, even worse in city driving to compare apples to apples.
Consumer robotics strikes me as an engineering tar pit so deep it leads to hell. If full self driving is hard due to the long tail of unusual special cases, this is orders of magnitude worse.
Take FSD but multiply the number of actuators and degrees of freedom by at least 10, more like 100. Add a third dimension. Add direct physical interaction with complex objects. Add pets and children. Add toys on the floor. Add random furniture with non-standard dimensions. Add exposure to dust, dirt, water, grease, and who knows what else? Puke? Bleach? Dog pee?
Oh, and remove designated roads and standardized rules about how you're supposed to drive on those roads. There are no standards. Every home is arranged differently. People behave differently. Kids are nuts. The cat will climb on it. The dog may attack it. The pet rabbit will chew on any exposed cords.
We've all seen those Boston Dynamics robots. They're awesome but how durable would they be in those conditions? Would they last for years with day to day constant abuse in an environment like that?
From a pure engineering point of view (neglecting the human factor or cost) a home helper robot is almost definitely harder than building and operating a Mars base. We pretty much have all the core tech for that figured out: recycling atmosphere, splitting and making water, refining minerals, greenhouses, airlocks, and so on. As soon as we have Starship or another super heavy rocket that's reliable we could do it as long as someone was willing to write some huge checks.
And of course it's a totally untested market. We don't know how big it really is. Will people really be willing to pay thousands to tens of thousands for a home robot with significant limitations? Only about 25% of the market probably has the disposable income to afford these.
You'd have to go way up market first, but people up market can afford to just pay humans to do it.