In 2016, alphago, an artificial intelligence developed by deepmind, defeated the top human player Li Sedol, triggering a new round of enthusiasm for AI among the public, capital and technology companies. “Everything + AI” has become the development direction of technology companies.
In the early years, smart speakers were once regarded as the entrance to the home Internet of Things, and the giants entered the game, which was extremely popular. But just two years later, the smart speaker industry started a price war, looking for new AI landing scenarios, which has become the direction of the joint efforts of practitioners.
Li Jie, general advisor of industrial artificial intelligence at Foxconn, said, “After a long period of technical accumulation and great commercial value in some fields, the biggest challenge for artificial intelligence is to quickly find more application scenarios to meet the needs of The market and capital are increasingly expecting it.”
If the exploration of smart speakers is just an “early taste version”, what should the choice of AI high-level players be? The answer is robotics.
In recent years, whether it is the image of robots written by science fiction writers or the development of the robot industry, AI and robots have been promoting and achieving each other.
On the one hand, when robots move from perceptual intelligence to cognitive intelligence, AI naturally becomes an important engine for robots to make substantial progress. On the other hand, the decline in robot manufacturing costs directly reduces industry costs.
In this context, more and more technology companies regard robots as the second growth point of enterprises. At the same time, as the crystallisation of AI’s physical wisdom, robotics are also sought after by many AI companies.
At present, the robot industry can be simply divided into industrial robots and service robots. The former is concentrated on the factory production line, while the latter can be applied to various logistics distribution, special operations, personal companionship, and family scenarios.
According to statistics, in 2017, non-industrial robots accounted for 70% of the global robot market. Compared with industrial robots that make a living in the hands of traditional manufacturing giants, the world of service robots is much broader.
The future is bright, the road is bumpy, and the commercial landing of service robots is the only way for the technology to get out of the laboratory. After the big waves, the robot companies that can still be independent bridgeheads either have a steady stream of blood transfusions from large factories, or they have created unique robots. The latter is obviously more rare.
In August last year, Musk publicly demonstrated the idea of Optimus for the first time at Tesla’s annual AI Open Day, even though the dancers at the AI Day were only humans in robotics suits.
A few days ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Twitter that the humanoid robot prototype will appear on the Tesla AI Day on September 30, “The next technological revolution is coming quietly, opening the global trillion-dollar blue ocean market”.
According to the parameters, Optimus is 5 feet 8 inches (about 1.73 metres) tall and weighs 125 pounds (about 56 kilograms).
The walking speed is 5 miles per hour (8 kilometres per hour) and can lift up to 45 pounds (about 20 kilograms), but can also lift up to 150 pounds (68 kilograms) in the deadlift position.
In terms of parameters, Tesla’s “Optimus” seems to be different from the tall and strong “Optimus” we imagined.
That’s because its power comes from its brain.
It is said that “Optimus” combines Tesla’s AI technology, that is, the automatic driving technology based on the predictive ability of the visual neural network nervous system, and the DOJO D1 supercomputer chip with extremely strong computing power.
According to the head of the DOJO project, Tesla’s DOJO is almost the fastest AI training computer in history.
Coupled with Tesla’s own high-bandwidth, low-latency connectors, the computing power can reach as high as 9pflops (9 petaflops), and our average human computing power can reach about 5 petaflops. This humanoid robot also That’s about the intelligence level of two of us adults.
It is also worth mentioning that the biggest highlight of “Optimus” is its hands.
This “human-grade” hand, with 5 freely retractable fingers, can perform any delicate task of human beings, even playing the piano.
Based on this function, Musk believes that the level of this robot is now enough to replace 70 to 80 percent of jobs, such as workers, waiters, etc., it can be competent.
If you are a factory owner, would you like to give you a few humanoid robots and let you fire all your employees? And this has also brought about the first layer of the artificial intelligence crisis, called 70% to 80% of people who are likely to lose their jobs in the future.
“The most important product development we’ve done this year is actually the Optimus humanoid robot… This business will be more important than the automotive business.”
At this stage, Musk has three major fears: the declining birth rate of mankind, the artificial intelligence crisis, and religious extremism.
For Musk, the mass production of humanoid robots will effectively solve the labor shortage caused by the declining birth rate.
Therefore, the humanoid robot “Optimus” was developed to replace humans to do those dangerous, boring and unwilling jobs.
Of course, as Tesla’s most important business in the future, Musk’s high hopes for robots go far beyond “Breakout! Another super new outlet is here! Billions.”
Storing human consciousness in Tesla’s “Optimus” has become one of Musk’s future ideas.
To this end, he even made a surprising statement, believing that most people do not need to live that long, and that in the future, they can achieve immortality by injecting consciousness into robots. He then adds that if that’s the case, then artificial intelligence is likely to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
As soon as these words came out, thousands of waves were aroused. Some netizens believed that Musk’s crazy idea was destroying mankind.
However, in fact, Neuralink has done experiments on monkeys before, implanting the chip into the monkey brain, and the monkey can play video games.
The technology is said to have been tested on monkeys for several rounds and worked well, confirming that it is very safe and reliable, and the Neuralink device can be safely removed.
In fact, the Neuralink chip was implanted not only in a monkey named Pager, but also in a pig named Gertrude, and all experiments were successful.
Now Musk’s brain-computer interface experiments have been transferred from monkeys to humans. He recently posted a job posting that he needed a director of clinical trials. This recruitment sends a major signal that human testing of Neuralink chips is about to start. It is reported that this human chip is expected to preserve individual memories, but it is mainly used to help people with physical disabilities acquire abilities.
This reminds the boss of the movie Terminator. The robots in it are conscious, and with their computing power, they can break all cryptographic systems. In the story of the Terminator, the Terminators have broken all nuclear weapons. Activate the password and let humanity produce a disaster.
Plus, Musk has always dreamed of colonising Mars. He had said in 2020 that 1,000 spacex starships would be built in 10 years to send 10 million people to Mars by 2050 and build a city. Later, Musk said that humans will be sent to Mars within 5 years at the earliest, and 10 years at the latest. “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be good – that’s what space-faring civilization is all about. It’s about believing in the future and thinking the future is going to be better than the past. I can’t think of anything better than going there or in More exciting things to do between galaxies.”
This means that the robot will carry important missions such as inspection and exploration of the surface of Mars, open the door to Mars for people on earth, let us truly enter deep space, approach Mars, and unveil its mysterious veil.
Of course, Musk, referred to as the “tech madman”, has continually acted unreasonably. It’s also unknown whether or not the “Optimus” may be mass-produced as scheduled subsequent year.
If next year, this robot, which claims to allow humans to live a prosperous life, really succeeds in energy production, Musk may change the world again.
The “14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Robot Industry” pointed out that by 2025, my country will become the source of global robot technology innovation, a high-end manufacturing cluster and a new highland for integrated applications; a number of robot core technologies and high-end products have made breakthroughs, and the whole machine will be integrated The indicators have reached the international advanced level.
According to the mckinsey report, by 2030, about 400 million jobs in the world will be replaced by automated robots. Based on the price of Optimus designed by Tesla at 300,000 yuan, the global humanoid robot market space will reach 120 trillion in the long run. , is a new and unprecedentedly large blue ocean market.
In fact, “Humanoid robots have not yet appeared, and the daily limit has been set off”. The current market focus is mainly on the intelligent manufacturing segment. A recent research report said that artificial intelligence and machine vision are also expected to benefit from the development of the industry.
Essence Securities also stated that new hardware based on future computing platforms will be fundamentally different from smartphones and previous hardware, and the importance of AI will become more prominent.
Guotai Junan pointed out that China has become one of the fastest growing markets in the global machine vision market. It is expected that from 2020 to 2023, the sales of China’s machine vision industry will grow at a compound growth rate of 27.15%, and by 2023 sales will reach 29.6 billion yuan.