Somehow Russia Made An Even Worse Robot Than Elon Musk (Allegedly)

Whether he believes it or not, Elon Musk continues to tell people his humanoid robot will change the world, end poverty, prevent crime, and ultimately be bigger than the cell phone. The only problem is, the last time we checked in on the humanoid robot that will allegedly turn Tesla into a $5 trillion company, it did not look ready for prime time. At all. The crypto bros who shilled NFTs as the next big thing may tell you Elon’s totally got this whole thing figured out, but from what we’ve seen so far, his continued obsession with these robots is just embarrassing.

But hey, it isn’t all bad news for Elon. Other companies are working on humanoid robots of their own, and while that does mean he has to deal with competition, it does also mean that if one of those other companies screws up, Tesla’s Optimus robot might not be the most embarrassingly terrible humanoid robot on Al Gore’s internet. I mean, what if, say, a Russian company held a launch event for a new humanoid robot, and it went so badly, it’s basically impossible to write about it without making at least one joke about the high rates of alcoholism in Russia?

If something like that happened, that would be terrible. And hilarious. As you can see in the video below, it was, in fact, also hilarious. 

The company in question here appears to be a Russian startup named AIdol (like Artificial Intelligence Doll, not Alabama Doll) that allegedly held its official reveal event earlier today. English-language coverage of the event is almost nonexistent, but the Ukrainian National News did cover it, citing a Telegram post from the independent Russian news outlet Astra, suggesting that the video is indeed real. As the video goes viral, though, the startup’s founders may end up wishing it had been fake. 

After all, this was supposed to be the big reveal. The robot future was supposed to be here, and everyone in the room was about to witness this humanoid robot walk for the first time. They knew how far along they were in the development process, they chose that date, and they even had the Rocky theme song playing. It was supposed to be a triumph. And then the robot comes out looking like something Honda would have refused to show the public back in the 1990s. 

Then, at about the 11-second mark, it gets even worse. It falls on its face, forcing two people on stage to scramble to pick it back up, while a third struggles to drag some black fabric across the stage to keep the audience from seeing what’s going on. Just a complete disaster and arguably worse than that time Faraday Future revealed a rebadged Chinese minivan. How do you even recover from a product reveal so bad, even Elon Musk is laughing at you?

Of course, it’s entirely possible we’re missing something here, but for now, let’s all just point and laugh at the bad Russian robot.