Musk expects Tesla Bot to be a much bigger business than its cars

The mediocre understatement Elon Musk introduced a short video about the Optimus Prototype, noting that as of last October it had to unfold onstage to wave like a politician.

“It’s worth remembering that this version of Optimus didn’t walk at all when we did AI day,” Musk said. “So the improvement rate here is very important. I’m obviously not doing parkour, but I’m walking around. I think there are multiple copies of Optimus.”

In this video, Optimus walks around, much slower than Boston Dynamics’ parkour-ready Atlas robot. Also, using an opposable thumb and a human-like hand, one Optimus robot removes a severed Optimus arm from the test stand, picks it up, and carries it to a workstation where another bot is working. increase. The third. A clever edit gives the impression that the first robot holds the arm in place and the second robot bolts to her third robot in an Android-based manufacturing mockup. increase.

That’s not the only thing that suffers compared to Atlas. Atlas is the most advanced humanoid robot on the planet and has been around for many years. But context here is important. Boston Dynamics has been developing biomimetic robots since 1992. The company unveiled his first humanoid PETMAN robot in 2009 and within two years showed it walking, crouching, kneeling and balancing against pushing forces. Atlas made his debut in 2013 and spent 10 years learning to dance, doing parkour and starting to perform some basic tasks. So it seems fair to give youthful Optimus time to catch up with his bots.

“What Tesla offers that no one else has is that we are the most advanced in real-world AI,” Musk said. “So the same AI that drives a car … You can think of a car as a robot on wheels. It’s a robot on legs. I think it’s not very useful to have a humanoid robot if you have to program every movement.It needs to be able to walk around and solve tasks autonomously. We need to be able to tell the robot something simple by showing it…or just telling it what to do.That’s our main advantage.”

“We are also good at designing for manufacturing and manufacturing at scale,” he continued. “All the Optimus actuators are custom-designed Tesla actuators. There are a huge number of electric motors, gearboxes, etc. in the world, but it turns out that none of them are useful in humanoid robots. The same team that designed the actuators for the robots. For practical purposes, what this means is that we can bring real products to market on a useful scale much faster than anyone else.”

We don’t know yet, but it’s definitely a departure from the research-first, limited-scale commercialization approach that Boston Dynamics has taken. Tesla has developed robots as mass-produced products from the beginning, and they are developing robots that are sufficiently useful for general-purpose, labor-saving.

Of course, general-purpose humanoid robots are projected to have an incredible impact on society as a whole, and Musk is pushing hard to build and put these robots into practical use as soon as possible, but what does that mean? I know very well what to do.

“Assuming what I’m saying is true, at least they are. It’s just a matter of timing, and we start to get into interesting questions,” he says. You can see the industrial use of humanoid robots for sure I think the ratio of humanoid robots to humans could exceed 1:1 at that point even what the economy means It’s not clear, if the economy is to produce but if the production is much higher and there is no limit on the number of people, what would the actual limit of the economy be? I am doing.”

When asked if a near-future generation of AI combined with humanoid robots would allow Tesla to survive automotive “production hell,” Musk didn’t think so, but hopefully he could lose his job. acknowledged that there is

“I don’t think AI will help build cars in the near future,” he said. “At that point, I think it makes no sense for any of us to work. I think that’s something we should worry about. Some kind of regulator overseeing the development of AI and ensuring that it operates within the public interest. AI is a very dangerous technology. I’m afraid they did something to accelerate.I think Tesla is doing good things with AI but this stresses me out so I don’t know what to say about it. yeah.”

Still, the Tesla Bot is going full steam ahead, and Musk believes investors still don’t know what they’re looking at.

“This is probably the least understood or underestimated part of what we do at Tesla, but it will be much more valuable than the automotive aspect in the long run,” he said. I got

You can jump to 1:48:20 in the video below to see where Optimus is.

Source: Tesla