Nobody supports the idea that humanoid robots are around the corner. NOBODY. I am not arguing on the NN side of things. I am sure on the synthesis of mechanical & NN side of things. The thing that makes a human so neat just from a science pov. So lets look at it from an investor POV. Could you put any value today?
The goal of the society that promotes humanoid robotics is to be there by 2040 and to have robots play world class soccer by 2050. Literally not a single researcher on the planet thinks it will be there by 202X. None. It's not that I had to do much searching to confirm that since I last looked at it all things have continued at the same pace they had been, which is good solid progress, year by year with thousands of researchers across the world contributing. Korea to Japan to Germany to USA. I do not see Tesla having any special competency and as an investor Eyes Wide Open. A lot of people have been working on this for decades. The fundamental science and research is not held by tesla, it was not discovered by tesla and Tesla won't own any specific competency there. I freely admit I don't know much about a lot and robotics is one and yet even I know that the key breakthroughs have not happened. You'd see it in Science magazine if a prototype was able to do so. This is like IBM backed project winning a chess and then a go match; anybody in the world with a brain knew it had happened. That meant that AI was becoming hot, that economic activity in that field would increase and 10 years after you would expect to see some real life implications. TA DA. Once you see a humanoid able to do something in Science magazine (or whatever equivalent scientific journal) it is going to be several years of heated funding on practical VC type work. Tesla is announcing product without the supporting relevant discoveries.
Bot is a neat project but it bears no resemblance to Tesla starting EVs where the Tesla team started exactly where I started but a year earlier and with more money. They started looking at the work done by the group in CA and saying..hey, that's going to change the world. I saw it, at least 4 other groups saw it and combined with the work done by the RMI it was clear that technology existed that was going to enable a practical EV. We all knew it could change the world with some hard work. 2 groups combined and that became Tesla. Humanoid robotics have nothing in common, there is no breakthrough lightbulb going off moment where some discovery is making hands and joint movements and tactile senses trivial. The NN is not the holdup here. They can't physically construct a hand that today can perform even a subset of the task. They can barely model it.
So walk it back. It's not that 1 researcher agrees with me. It is that they all do and I can say that after only an hours worth of reading literature. I'm trying to be helpful by reducing the froth being generated from easily misconstrued comments by EM. EMs comments on this are dangerous if anyone is using those to justify any investment hypothesis with anything other than a decades long view and I mean HODL for 20-40 years. As the son of stockbrokers and the grandson of stockbrokers and the brother of stockbrokers I can tell you how rare that is. Again, nothing indicates Tesla has any particular competency in this space. I'll archive this post and if I'm alive in 2030 we can circle back with each other and see what's happened. In the meantime. Eyes wide open. Go read the literature on the field and go to the next humanoid conference and see how you feel after talking it through with hundreds of the best researchers in the field. If you are changing your hypothesis or exhorting others to do the same based on some value being attached to Bots than you are engaging in speculation.
The investment hypothesis to me is unchanged: EVs and Energy. Those are the competencies and they are all centered around batteries. To whit, to understand Tesla's value is to understand batteries. They are not even trying to take octovalve into HVAC. FSD was a reaction to a Waymo and the realization that 80% was easy and Waymo maybe a threat (smart realization) and a bit of hubris because he does not really get software and how hard this last bit is going to be. Teslas do not even have the hardware yet to get to L4, it's going to be an upgrade to the computers (they are maxed out and there is no redundancy) and (based on posters that seem credible) likely 2 more cameras. It's years away to L4/5. The new computer chips will likely require that the Samsung Fab is finished and working properly, 2-3 years (spitball)? Then 1 year to get to scale so 4 years on hardware? A year or 2 more on software? So 5-6 years til a trial L4/5 is my guess than a geofenced trail and that will be the highlight of the robotaxi valuation to me. That's for something that is "1 year away" and no I am not an expert on that at all. Not at all. I'm just spitballing. it's why I discount all the robotaxi valuation, it is years out at best and if you do a DCF analysis on revenues from years out with uncertainty etc than you'd be very careful of putting value on it. FSD when it comes will be worth something and Tesla is a leader today- that's fine for me. On the robotics side of things I can't even spitball so it is beyond 2030. Likely 2040. I can tell you with some certainty what a white oak will look like if we plant it today and come back in 2040. I'm used to making plans for forest that will be thriving long after I am dead. Most people don't invest with that same mentality.
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