Yesterday, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk posted a short new video of the company’s Optimus humanoid robot. In this new footage, the Tesla bot can be seen walking inside a Tesla factory (most probably Fremont, California).
The company also released a new 4K resolution image of the Tesla Optimus Gen 2 prototype. This new image is of the robot’s rather finished form and the one we see in the walk video is stripped off of its outer shell and looks like a raw machine.
Last year, Tesla also released a video showing the Optimus Gen 1 robot walking inside the Fremont factory and at the company’s Robot Lab.
We cannot differentiate much in both of these walks by looking at the videos but there certainly are improvements in the mechanism, function, and speed — the details of which Tesla did not share in this update.
Walking much more human-like than before!pic.twitter.com/IHjEAYOOlY
— Teslaconomics (@Teslaconomics) January 31, 2024
It has been more than two years since the company’s CEO Elon Musk announced the Tesla Robot at AI Day 2021. At the time, the Tesla Bot was just a concept, Tesla did not even have an early prototype to show. However, the company has been sharing the Optimus development progress every few months since then.
Tesla shared another video of the Tesla Optimus earlier last month. This video showed Tesla’s humanoid robot folding a shirt. This newly-gained ability of Optimus is the daily need of billions of humans across the globe.
In the 2023 end-of-year Tesla Optimus update video, the robot was shown handling delicate objects like eggs with precision and care. Elon Musk said that in a year, Optimus will be able to thread a needle as well.
Elon Musk has said that humanoid robots will take over most of the daily boring and repetitive tasks in the future. And folding shirts is one of them of course. This creates a large marketplace for humanoid robot assistants and Tesla is aiming to keep its lead in this segment as well.
At last year’s Tesla Shareholder Meeting, Musk said “Tesla’s long-term value will be Optimus“. Elon Musk’s prediction might just prove to be true with the passing years just like the company’s Model Y electric SUV becoming the world’s best-selling vehicle last year.
Elon Musk endorsed a statement last month that by the decade of 2040, humans should expect about 1 billion humanoid robots on Earth. More interestingly, Musk also agreed that by the 2060s, we should be able to send around 100 billion robots into the entire solar system.
If somehow this scenario becomes real, even 50%, Tesla will be at the forefront of mass-producing humanoid robots and will become the leader of a virtually infinite marketplace.
However, it has been more than 2 years since the announcement of the Tesla Robot and we do not have a solid timeline as to when it will be going on sale. However, Elon Musk gave a flexible timeline of 2 – 3 years in another tweet referencing the development of the humanoid robot by Boston Dynamics.
According to Musk, Optimus is a startup in its own right at this point in time. He’s probably trying to hint that it might be an entirely new company that only builds humanoid robots in the future, just like Starlink is a separate entity from its parent company SpaceX.
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