By The Financial District
Jan 181 min
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has posted a video of the company's latest-generation Optimus humanoid robot painstakingly folding a shirt on a table.
The clip shows Optimus pulling a T-shirt out of a nearby basket and carefully folding it.
But there's one glaring problem: it needed a significant amount of help, as eagle-eyed viewers pointed out an engineer’s hand was doing the job, as reported by Victor Tangerman for Futurism.
"Optimus folds a shirt," Musk wrote in the caption of his initial video posted to his social media network X.
The clip shows Optimus pulling a T-shirt out of a nearby basket and carefully folding it. But viewers quickly spotted a gloved hand in the bottom right of the video, strongly suggesting the robot was being directly controlled by a nearby engineer.
"Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment," the self-anointed "chief troll officer" added in a follow-up tweet just over 20 minutes later.
It's unclear if Musk posted his follow-up in reaction to users pointing out the trickery or whether he was planning to post it regardless.
Either way, it's not exactly a good look, given Musk's tendency to contort the truth. Musk overpromising and underdelivering is nothing new. The real yardstick, which he conveniently ignored in his original tweet, is what such a robot is capable of doing on its own.