A 26-year-old ex-Tesla engineer did for $200K what Musk spent billions on, and his version is better
At Tesla, Liang Wei worked on Optimus. His job: teach the robot to walk. Liang kept telling management the future wasn’t in legs, it was in the face. That people don’t care how a robot walks. They care how it looks at you. Nobody listened.
He quit. 9 friends. Shenzhen. A neural net that spent two years eating thousands of hours of human facial footage. Every squint, every head turn toward a voice, every micro-smile. One day the robot looked at one of the engineers and smiled so naturally he flinched away from his desk.
At the expo, the line at his booth was longer than Tesla’s. The company is valued at $400 million. Meanwhile Optimus is still learning not to trip.
What matters more: teaching a robot to walk or teaching it to fee