News from Tesla and NeurIPS 2023

Optimus-2 and very cool threads from research groups at NeurIPS.

Optimus-2

But first, the biggest news today is Tesla premiering the next version of its Optimus humanoid robot… called Optimus Gen 2. The video introduction was released in this tweet a few hours ago. Notable features are a 2 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) actuated neck, 30% faster walking speed, 22 lb lighter weight, and enough sensors and dexterity in its fingers to handle an egg and place it on a pan. The video is cool, and remarkably captured in real-time with no video gimmicks and PR stunts unlike Google last week. You can also read about our previous coverage on Optimus here.

NeurIPS 2023

There is a lot of material from NeurIPS which makes it very hard to summarize after a very long day. Just visiting the posters in the exhibit area is a lot of work. Hence, I will just leave some pointers to interesting work that caught my attention today.

• Google has a massive presence at NeurIPS 2023. The full contributions from Google are available here. Many of them are centered around varieties of Lar…