Everything Elon said about Optimus at the All-In Summit today: • We’re finalizing the design of Optimus v3. That release is going to be a very remarkable robot. It will have manual dexterity comparable to a human, meaning a very complex hand, an AI mind that can navigate and... comprehend reality, and will be made in very high volume. • Other robotics companies are missing those three very hard things. • I spend more mental cycles on Optimus than any other single thing. Solving real-world AI, all of the electrical-mechanical issues, the supply chain, and production challenges. • There is no supply chain for humanoid robots, so it has to be created from scratch, which requires a lot of vertical integration. None of the actuators in Optimus are available from an existing supply chain. • I think if successful, Optimus would be the biggest product ever. • The marginal cost of production, once we hit a million units per year, will probably be around $20,000. It depends on how much we spend on the AI chip in the robot, and we’ll need to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators—26 actuators per arm (26 motors, gearboxes, and power electronics). The AI chip might cost $5,000 or $6,000, maybe more. At 1 million units a year, production cost will be $20,000, maybe $25,000. Price will be a function of demand. • Human hands have evolved to be incredibly sophisticated machines. Hands are a very first instrument. You can swing a baseball bat, thread a needle, play a piano or violin, and assemble a car. Hands are incredibly versatile instruments. Most of the muscles of the hands are actually in the forearm, and the hand is almost like a puppet. Human tendon evolution is incredibly good. The human hand has 27 or 28 degrees of freedom, depending on how you count it; it’s amazing. • In order to create a robot that can be a generalized humanoid, you must solve the “hands problem.” • Even though there are 10,000 to 20,000 electric motors out there, we couldn’t buy the actuators for any amount of money. We had to design every electric motor, gearbox, and controlling electronics from scratch, from first principles of physics. • Optimus is harder than developing any previous Tesla product, but not harder than Starship. • Right now, we’re struggling with the final design of the hardware, primarily the hand. The hands and forearm are the majority of the engineering difficulty of the entire robot. • If you want to do all the things that a human can do, it turns out you need a humanoid robot. If you want to do a subset, that’s much easier. Humans evolved to the shape and capability that we have for a good reason. There is value to having four fingers and a thumb; even the pinky is quite useful. Toes are much more of a question mark. • The AI5 inference chip will be 40 times better than AI4 by some measures. We know the limiting factors of the chip because the AI software and hardware teams work so closely. Effectively, the Tesla AI hardware and software teams are co-designing the chip. • The Softmax function on AI4 takes 40 steps in emulation mode, which will take only a few steps in AI5 natively. AI5 will easily handle mixed precision. • In terms of nominal raw compute, the AI5 inference chip has 8 times more compute, 9 times more memory, and 5 times more memory bandwidth compared to AI4. Because we’re addressing some core limitations and optimizations at the silicon level, we’re able to realize 40x improvements.show more

The Humanoid Hub

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