Tesla has released a new video of its Optimus humanoid robot achieving a new milestone: walking autonomously outside.
Fans are rejoicing at the progress, but the video reminds us of something else.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been telling shareholders that Optimus is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity for the company.
Musk believes that Tesla is going to eventually produce tens of millions of Optimus robots per year.
Tesla is already using some robots inside its factory and Musk suggested that Tesla could start selling the robot to outside customers as soon as next year. He has been guiding a price between $25,000 and $30,000 per robot.
However, some people have been having doubts, especially after Tesla wasn’t super transparent about the fact that its robots were remotely operated at its recent ‘We, Robot’ event.
Tesla has been releasing frequent updates about the progress made in developing its humanoid robot. We recently reported on an impressive new hand for Optimus.
Now, Tesla has released a video of Optimus walking outside:
Milan Kovac, Tesla’s head of Optmius, commented on the video:
These runs are on mulched ground, where I’ve myself slipped before. What’s really crazy here is that for these, Optimus is actually blind! Keeping its balance without video (yet), only other on-board sensors consumed by a neural net running in ~2-3ms on its embedded computer.
The video is extremely similar to a video Boston Dynamics posted more than 8 years ago:
That puts things into perspective.
Electrek’s Take
As I have often stated, I believe that Tesla will achieve useful humanoid robots at scale faster than unsupervised self-driving.
I think AI is improving fast, and it makes sense to have useful humanoid robots that could efficiently leverage AI to perform useful tasks.
It’s wise for Tesla to use its existing expertise in inference computing and batteries to prepare for this, but let’s be honest: they are not reinventing the wheel here. A lot of what Optimus is accomplishing now has been done a long time ago, as shown in the videos above.
Tesla’s potential advantage here is its capacity to leverage its existing scale in battery packs and inference computers and its ability to profitably scale the production of complex products, like electric cars.
In terms of actual technological capabilities, I think Tesla is behind the competition in humanoid robots, but it could catch up with scale and profitability in the future.