Ask HN: Nvidia pretended their robot was not remote controlled – why?
When Musk used actors in robot suits or demoed remote-controlled robots without admitting they weren’t real, I was genuinely confused. As a Brit, I wonder—is this just accepted in the U.S. as harmless fun, even if it's misleading?
It’s like those American sports halftime shows where “random” crowd members do weird things, but they’re clearly actors. Most people don’t notice, and those who do don’t seem to care.
In Europe, that kind of deception feels like a red flag. We expect clear boundaries: either something’s a concept, a prototype, or a finished product. Pretending it’s real erodes trust.
TL;DR: Is American marketing more comfortable with blurring reality, while European marketing prioritizes transparency?
> Nvidia pretended their robot was not remote controlled – why?
Because Tesla did and got away with it.
> Is American marketing more comfortable with blurring reality?
Yes. It's in our culture, for better or worse, I mean, worse. Like solardev commented, our culture doesn't really mind being lied to on the regular.
Everyone lies to us: politicians on both sides of the aisle, the media, even our schools.
And yes, it's weird. If you want to escape it, you work toward developing high agency and violating norms and rules (and hopefully, not harming others).
America is not a truth-based society. We don't really have truth in our news, in our advertising, in our politics, in our schools, in our religions, in our marketing... and we have very weak consumer protections. Basically we just believe whatever our rich people tell us and those who speak out against them are demonized.
We don't really value critical thinking or evidence based analyses. It's all just propaganda now.
I don't think this is matter of national culture. I think this is part of humanity - just exists humans-entrepreneurs, who trying to make things which other people thinking impossible.
And unfortunately, human view is a brake, in most cases, people not only avoid to see obvious things, but tend to make powerful resistance to new things.
For example, Dropbox, now all thinking it is obvious, but at beginning all investors avoid to talk about it, and creators need some way to broke this wall.
They created fake video, how somebody would copy files between all his devices, and gathered emails of people who want to become first users of this technology. And gathered some huge number of registrations, and after this one VC fund agreed to give them money for prototype.
So this is part of startup culture, named "make it - fake it". It need to support people, who have really cool ideas and agree to sacrifice their life to work on idea and for future earns if this idea will win.
And yes, I have so large number of talks with such people, I could definitely say - they usually so unusual that typical person think them just crazy and sure will not invest in them money, and this is really Great problem.
Fortunately, US partially resolved this problem, created places with very special culture, where non-standard people could flourish, but in Europe/Britain, things are not so good, and that's why Europe lags behind progress.
Examples of startup friendly places are California and Texas. And BTW, they are very different, for example you could see TV series "Halt and Catch Fire (2017)". I have spent very pleasant time with first season, but you could try to see all seasons, may be you will see something what I have not catch.
BTW you could read history of Osborne company on wiki, but better if you'll read after TV series, as there are some important clues to understand.
Did they say somewhere it was not remote controlled? When I watched the demo I assumed it was, because otherwise Jensen would’ve probably mentioned it.
RC car remote control != semi-autonomous robot remote control
Europeans are members of the reality-based community.
I don't mind the fake robots as much as the fake charts. In their GPU announcements at CES, they compared performance of previous generation and new generation with the new generation using 4x frame generation so it's only doing 1/4 of the 3D work (claiming the 5070 was 4090 performance for $749).
In their AI announcements they had a similar chart showing performance numbers in TFLOPS of previous and newly announced hardware. In the fine print the new numbers were using 4-bit FP4.
I get the sense that Nvidia thinks they can make anything, say anything, and sell it for whatever they want in the current AI boom.