You say this like it's a bad idea. These VLA models are going to be even more disruptive than the coding models because otherwise it's prohibitively expensive to set up an industrial robot for most uses.
My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
> My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.
Indeed.
Even with 9 million total cars sold, Tesla still has yet to solve for driving safely with no interventions across just the contiguous USA.
With a similar approach, a million robots operating for years is still a long way short of gathering the data needed for training an AI to autonomously operate safely in a full range of industrial environments.
(That said, IMO remote-controlled humanoid robots still make a lot of sense, they'd only need a little bit of AI to assist rather than to do everything; if I was in Musk's position, I would be selling that vision of the future rather than claiming fully autonomous AI-driven androids are anywhere near).
It's yet another gamble where if it works out he will look like a visionary and if it doesn't he'll look like an idiot. The exact sort of bet that Elon never fails to go for.
My main doubts about Tesla's plan are that they will sell enough of these to get benefits of scale or that Musk will force the engineering team to "skip lidar" again and compromise the design.