They marched in line, interacted with guests and poured drinks while making small talk. The vision of the future Elon Musk put forward with his Optimus humanoid robots at Tesla’s recent Cybercab event earlier this month was as astounding as it was unbelievable.

That latter word was important: It turned out the robots weren’t operating under their own steam, but were instead remotely operated by humans. While the robots were able to walk down the street in Tesla’s grand parade to show off its tech under their own steam, pretty much everything else they did that night involved human intervention.

"We are in the proof of concept phase for robotics. While we’ve seen many demos online and on stage, the capabilities of these machines have been designed for controlled environments and limited use cases," said Nayan Jain, executive director of AI at digital product studio ustwo. "If you look deeper at live demos and videos, the generic walk cycles and manipulation tasks like pick and place or tool use are technically impressive, but [they are] not robust enough to work independently."

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