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OPTIMUS: TESLA’S HUMANOID ROBOT IS ABOUT TO TRANSFORM LABOR & ABUNDANCE Optimus isn’t just a cool prototype—it’s Tesla’s bet on solving the biggest economic constraint of the future: physical labor shortages. Designed from the ground up as a general-purpose humanoid, Optimus will handle unsafe, repetitive, or boring tasks at...

46,045 views • 6 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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Elon just dropped a MAJOR nugget on how Tesla is going to be training Optimus to do real world tasks. They are building an Optimus Academy, which is a large scale, dedicated real-world training facility to accelerate the development of Optimus. The Academy will deploy thousands of Optimus units, potentially 10,000 to 30,000 robots, in a controlled realistic environment where they perform self-play, experiment with tasks, iterate on behaviors, and continuously generate training data through trial and error. The Tesla bots will also run millions of simulations in Tesla’s high-fidelity physics-accurate engine, allowing Optimus to close the “sim-to-real gap” by using these real-world observations to refine and validate the simulations! “You’re actually highlighting an important limitation and difference from cars. We’ll soon have 10 million cars on the road. It’s hard to duplicate that massive training flywheel. For the robot, what we’re going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of an Optimus Academy so they can do self-play in reality. We’re actually building that out. We can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20-30,000, that are doing self-play and testing different tasks. Tesla has quite a good reality generator, a physics-accurate reality generator, that we made for the cars. We’ll do the same thing for the robots. We actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks. You can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world. You use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap. Close the sim-to-real gap.”

Teslaconomics

42,563 views • 6 months ago

Elon Musk just made the boldest product prediction in modern business: Optimus will be 10 times larger than the biggest product ever created. Not comparable to the largest products. Ten times bigger than whatever holds that record now. Musk: “I think it will be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made.” The claim sounds delusional until you trace the logic. Mass-market humanoid robots need three things simultaneously: real intelligence, natural language understanding, and manufacturing at scale with mass-market pricing. That combination is almost impossible. Most companies have one element, maybe two. Nobody else has all three solved. Musk: “Tesla is the only company with all the required ingredients.” AI trained on physical world tasks, not just text. Vision systems proven across millions of vehicles. Autonomous decision-making deployed at scale. Manufacturing capability producing complex products in millions of units affordably. Cost discipline through vertical integration. Every required component already exists inside Tesla, developed for cars but transferable to humanoid form. Musk: “You should be able to ask them to do things naturally.” When robots understand natural commands and execute tasks autonomously, usefulness becomes universal. Not specialized equipment for factories. General-purpose capability adapting to any physical task you need done. Universal usefulness means market size stops being defined by applications. It becomes defined by human labor itself. Musk: “Nothing will even be close.” The prediction isn’t that Optimus succeeds. It’s that success creates commercial value exceeding everything in history by an order of magnitude. Useful robots at consumer prices don’t sell in millions. They sell in billions. Every home. Every business. Every job currently requiring human physical presence. The addressable market becomes all human labor. And human labor is the largest market in existence. Tesla possesses the complete capability stack. AI, manufacturing, cost optimization, real-world deployment experience. The exact combination required to build genuinely useful robots at prices enabling mass adoption. If the prediction holds, this isn’t a product category. It’s the product category that makes everything else look like rounding errors. The iPhone revolutionized communication and sold over 2 billion units. Optimus targets physical labor, a market orders of magnitude larger, with comparable adoption potential if the capability delivers. Ten times bigger than the next biggest product isn’t hyperbole if you’re solving human physical labor at consumer economics. It’s just math on what happens when scarcity in the largest market disappears.

Dustin

26,722 views • 6 months ago

Everything Elon said about Optimus on the Q4 2024 earnings call: ⦿ I see a path for Tesla to be the most valuable company in the world, possibly bigger than the next five companies combined, overwhelmingly due to autonomous vehicles and autonomous humanoid robots. ⦿ The training compute needed for Optimus will ultimately probably be 10× what is needed for cars. Humanoids likely have 1,000× more useS than a car, which doesn't mean training scales by 1,000×, but probably close to 10×. The training compute will scale progressively as Optimus becomes more productive. ⦿ Long-term, Optimus has the potential to generate $10 trillion in revenue. In that scenario, we can support a lot of training compute. Even $500 billion in training compute is a good deal (chuckles). ⦿ There's a lot of uncertainty with timing because several aspects are being iterated simultaneously. The internal plan is for roughly 10,000 robots to be built this year, but we'll more likely produce several thousand. ⦿ I'm confident those several thousand robots will be able to do useful things. ⦿ The lessons from Production V1 will inform the changes in Production V2, which we expect to launch around mid-next year. ⦿ Our goal, aspirationally, is to ramp 10× every year, but perhaps we end up with 5× growth per year. With that kind of growth, it won't be many years before we're making 100 million robots a year. ⦿ The off-the-shelf components didn't work well, so we had to design everything in-house, including the most sophisticated hand ever made. Optimus will be able to play a piano and thread a needle. ⦿ My long-term prediction is that Optimus will overwhelmingly be the value of the company. ⦿ Optimus is not design-locked. It is rapidly evolving in a good direction. Tesla has by far the best humanoid robotics engineers in the world. Tesla also has all the other necessary ingredients: battery pack, power electronics, charging, communications, real-world AI, and the ability to scale production. ⦿ What other companies are missing is real-world AI and the ability to scale to millions of units a year. ⦿ This year, we aim to use Optimus internally at Tesla. We can easily use several thousand robots at Tesla for repetitive tasks, such as loading sheet metal at the welding line. ⦿ The Production V1 line is roughly 1,000 units per month. The Production V2, launching around mid-next year, will be for 10k units per month. The line after that will be for 100k units a month. Of course, it takes time for any given line to reach its maximum potential. ⦿ A very rough guess: we'll start delivering Optimus to companies outside of Tesla in the second half of 2026. The ramp is going to be exponential, and demand will not be a problem. ⦿ Once we're above 1 million units per year, the production cost of Optimus will be less than $20,000. Its total mass and complexity are much lower than a car. At a similar production volume to the Model Y, Optimus should be about half the cost of a Model Y. ⦿ The price is a different matter than cost. The price of Optimus will be set by market demand. [This is by far the longest Elon has ever spent discussing Optimus on an earnings call.]

The Humanoid Hub

96,475 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk just shattered the mainstream panic about manufacturing layoffs. Media assumes automation equals shrinking workforce. Actual physics dictates the exact opposite. Musk: “So we’re not planning any like layoffs or reductions in personnel, in fact we will increase our headcount.” The incumbent market is completely miscalculating the robotics revolution. They think Optimus is a replacement. It’s a massive multiplier. Give a biological operator an exoskeleton of synthetic labor and the unit economics of the company completely invert. Don’t fire the operator. Hire more to direct the expanding swarm. One human managing a cell of fifty Optimus units means kinetic output scales to the point where growth violently accelerates. That acceleration mathematically demands even more people to oversee the expanding grid. Musk: “What we do expect is that the output per person at Tesla becomes very, very high.” The goal isn’t minimizing human workforce to save on payroll. The goal is maximizing sheer industrial violence of production capacity. The factory worker transitions from turning wrenches to commanding a robotic fleet. Musk: “The output per human at Tesla is going to get nutty high.” Companies winning the automation race won’t be the ones with the smallest headcounts. They’ll be the ones achieving the highest ratio of synthetic-to-biological execution. Which forces them to aggressively hire more humans just to keep up with the gravity of their own explosive scale. The robotics transition isn’t downsizing. It’s mass promotion. Tesla has roughly 100,000 humans physically building machines or managing people who build machines. The arrival of Optimus doesn’t delete those roles. It elevates them. The human brain is vastly overqualified for rote physical labor. When Optimus absorbs the repetitive physical friction of the assembly line, the biological worker gets instantly promoted from manual laborer to director of compute and steel. They stop doing the work. They start orchestrating the machines that do the work. Total headcount increases because the enterprise needs an expanding army of human cognitive bandwidth to direct massive, zero-marginal-cost robotic output. And that’s the part everyone’s missing. The future isn’t humans versus robots. It’s humans commanding robots. And whoever builds that infrastructure first doesn’t just win manufacturing. They rewrite what manufacturing even means.

Dustin

96,576 views • 5 months ago

Everything Lars Moravy, Tesla's VP of Engineering, said about Optimus in the latest interview on Herbert's channel: On the transition of Fremont's Model S/X lines to Optimus: - Space has been cleared out - Our first line has landed (in Fremont) from our automation groups in the Midwest and Germany, and we've started to install it - Machines are going through the last stages of FAT (field acceptance testing) - The first line is quite modular, so bring-up can be quick - A line takes 2-3 days to install and a week to get going - After proving out the first sub-line, we have 40 more to go - Sub-lines are for different components like actuators, torso, battery, limbs, etc. - Multiple factors go into 'make-vs-buy' decisions: does a supplier know how to do it, do we keep the IP in-house, is the investment significant, is the risk of change high Do car manufacturing strengths pass to Optimus? - Tesla has learned the hard parts of scaling from cars and batteries: parts flow in/out of the factory building, multiple levels of supply chain, multi-sourcing, crisis management - Optimus benefits from that foundation. The lines are designed by the same experienced people who have learned the importance of precision and repeatability, and OEE and uptime - The BOM cost of a car is more than a robot (Optimus) - Tesla has the trifecta: scale manufacturing, electric motor design, and real-world AI - Optimus is more like a car than a consumer electronics device, because of its high functional safety and multi-axis dimensions The humanoid form factor: - The form has to feel like it belongs in our space - It's important to start with C-3PO (a humanoid from), then we'll see expansion into other forms like R2-D2

The Humanoid Hub

65,952 views • 1 month ago

🚨ELON'S OPTIMUS: HUMANITY'S FIRST TRUE COMPANION IN THE QUEST TO BECOME INTERPLANETARY Elon recently claimed Optimus "has potential to be the biggest product of all time." Not a car. Not a rocket. A robot companion that could fundamentally reshape what it means to be human. Elon, 2024: "I think people will start to regard their personal Optimus robot as sort of a friend. In Star Wars, you sort of like R2-D2 and C-3PO. You got quite attached to those characters." Think about what that actually means. C-3PO wasn't just a tool—he was loyal, helpful, worried about his friends. He had personality. He cared. Now imagine that companion working 24/7, never tiring, capable of performing surgery, teaching your children, caring for elderly parents, cooking meals, and helping build habitats on Mars. Elon's vision isn't just about productivity. It's about partnership. Humanity's greatest limitation is time and biology. We sleep. We age. We die. Optimus doesn't. Elon: "You can create a world where there is no poverty, where everyone has access to the finest medical care." To colonize Mars, we need labor that can survive radiation, work in -80°F cold, and build infrastructure before humans arrive. Optimus is that workforce. But more than that—it's the companion that makes isolation on a dead planet bearable. "80% of Tesla's value will be Optimus." $20 trillion. Because it's not a product. It's humanity's co-pilot to the stars. Source: Tesla / Benzinga / CNBC Clip: Interview at Cannes Lions, June 2024

Mario Nawfal

1,017,408 views • 10 months ago

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.

The Humanoid Hub

238,877 views • 11 months ago

Data has always been the bottleneck for physical AI in self driving and robotics. Tesla is taking two very different approaches for FSD and Optimus. Tesla’s Optimus Training Playbook: 1. Build 30k Optimus Gen 3 robots 2. Operate them in a mock environment where they can perform self-play “Optimus Academy” 3. Train in sim using the real robot data to close sim2real gap. Tesla FSD Training Playbook: 1. Sell millions of cars outfitted with cheap cameras 2. Collect diverse real world driving data (especially intervention and failure recovery data) for free as a byproduct of customers driving the cars. 3. Use driving data to train Autopilot/FSD and deploy policies incrementally as a supervised FSD product 4. Repeat until policy reaches robust unsupervised full self driving for robotaxi launch. The Tesla FSD playbook is a beautiful self-funding, customer subsidized, diverse real world data flywheel. The Optimus playbook is the opposite and shares none of the beautiful attributes of the FSD training flywheel that made FSD successful. The key differences: 1. Instead of having customers pay you for vehicles, Tesla will need to fund 30,000 Optimus robots. Assuming the current landed cost per unit is $100k, that will be $3B to build plus another ~30% per year for maintenance labor and spare parts given it’s still an unhardened pre-production prototype is another $900M per year. For reference, Tesla’s GAAP net income in 2025 was $3.8B. 2. Instead of having customers drive their Teslas on roads all across the world giving Tesla an insanely rich and diverse dataset that Waymo and other AV companies could never collect, the Optimus Academy is doing the equivalent of building a fake town in a parking lot and driving their car in that parking lot. No matter how real you try to make the environments for self-play you can never replicate the diversity, complexity and failure modes of the real world. Data collected in staged environments produces demo-grade policies and will not be rich enough to generalize to the vast diversity of environments, tasks, objects, etc. out of distribution. 3. Instead of having customers collect real world failure recovery data (DAgger style) for free every time FSD disengages, the Optimus Academy will need paid teleoperators or onsite operators to collect the recovery data. Assuming 1 person can manage 2 robots to start that would cost $3.5B in labor per year (30,000 robots, $40/hr fully loaded, 16 hrs/day, 365 days per year, 2:1 robot:operator). Tesla can come up with the money to do this but money doesn’t solve the “mock data” problem. Given the higher degrees of freedom in humanoids vs. cars, training a generalized humanoid will be harder and require more data than a self-driving vehicle. The best way to train your robot is by deploying them in the diverse real world, subsidized by real customer operations. Humanoids face a chicken and egg where it’s very hard to bootstrap your way to a first policy that’s good enough to deploy in real production environments. This is an extremely capital intensive playbook (which doesn’t even include cost of training). Time will tell if it works but a better playbook would be finding a way to copy the FSD playbook.

Simon Kalouche

34,671 views • 6 months ago