Tesla CEO Elon Musk Draws Comparison Between Looi And Butter Robot From Rick And Morty

Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday responded to quirky robot Looi with a reference to the popular animated sitcom Rick and Morty.

About Looi: Looi is a desktop robot from Tangible Future that magnetically connects with a smartphone and uses the phone screen for a face.

Looi, the company says, will be powered by ChatGPT and have a wide range of emotions, making it a warm desktop companion with which you can even play games. It will effectively avoid desk edges and can also be used as a wireless charging station.

The company is currently looking for backers to fund Looi on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.

One simply has to connect Looi’s hardware to their Android or iOS phones. The hardware starts at $169 without offers and is available for purchase all around the world, as per Kickstarter. The robot will start mass production in July 2024 and the products will start to be shipped to local warehouses in August 2024.

Musk Reacts: Musk responded to the little bot on X on Friday with a short “pass the butter.” The phrase is a reference to the animated sitcom Rick and Morty.

In the first season of the series, Rick makes a little robot called ‘butter robot’ exclusively to pass himself the butter at the family dinner table. The robot, however, eventually dies when it attempts to do more than simply pass the butter.

Why It Matters: Musk’s Tesla is developing a humanoid robot nicknamed Optimus which, Musk said on Friday, will be ‘awesome.’

During Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings call in January, CEO Elon Musk expressed optimism about delivering some units of its Optimus humanoid robot next year.

“I think we’ve got a good chance of shipping some number of Optimus units next year,” Musk said. However, the CEO also warned that there is a lot of uncertainty and it is impossible to make a precise prediction. “I do think it has the potential to be the most valuable product of any kind ever by far,” he added.

Tesla introduced its humanoid bot in 2021 with the initial goal of handling unsafe, repetitive, or tedious tasks.

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Image Credit: Tangible Future

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