Elon Musk on Friday delivered on the most anticipated announcement from Tesla's AI Day, revealing a working prototype of the Optimus humanoid robot, also known as the Tesla Bot.
The technology behind the robot also powers the full self-driving (FSD) capabilities inside Tesla vehicles, though Musk didn't provide too much of an update on that last night. The event did, however, serve to further Tesla's goal of being perceived as more than a car company. "We are arguably the leader in real-world AI," Musk told attendees.
The robot reveal opened the show. A prototype walked out from behind two doors, revealing a silver body covered with intricate wiring. The crowd, largely made up of engineers and potential recruits for the company, cheered as the robot waved. It then made a “raise the roof” motion with both hands before walking back through the doors.
That was it.
“This is literally the first time the robot has operated without a tether, on stage tonight,” Musk said. He and the team onstage who built it seemed visibly nervous to debut the bot publicly. “The robot can do a lot more than we showed you, we just didn’t want it to fall on its face.” He then played a video of the robot doing things like moving boxes and watering plants in an office.
Musk addressed the fact that the robot was clearly less advanced than some others out there, like this dancing trio from Boston Dynamics.
“You’ll see other humanoid robots but the difference is that they’re missing a brain,” said Musk. “They’re also very expensive and made at low volume. The Optimus is a very capable robot made at high volume and expected to cost less than $20,000.” (Boston Dynamics' robot dog costs $74,500.)
He used the prototype's shortcomings as a recruiting pitch for engineers to join Tesla.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done to refine Optimus and improve it,” said Musk. “That’s why we’re hosting this event—to convince some of the most talented people to join Tesla and bring it to reality and help millions of people. The potential boggles the mind.”
Musk and the other presenters repeatedly referenced the importance of utility for the robot, which will have opposable thumbs to use tools in a human-like fashion. “We want to make thousands, maybe millions [of them],” said Musk. The company has previously stated its plans to deploy the robots in Tesla factories.
As for the FSD technology, which can be activated on cars for an extra $15,000, Tesla said around 2,000 customers tested FSD in 2021 and 160,000 in 2022, thanks to the “sweat and blood of the engineering team over the last year.” The team's current goal is to enable vehicles to navigate between parking lots, negotiate stop lights, and do things like independently evaluate whether to drive in front of a crossing pedestrian or wait to go behind to not scare the person.
Tesla cameras process images of the car’s surroundings and make decisions every 50 milliseconds, according to one presenter. Most of the AI Day presentations reviewed the image-processing technology and how it "learns" to process infinite variations in surroundings so the vehicle can navigate safely.
There was also no substantial update or announcement about the Dojo D1 Chip, another big reveal from last year. Tesla is continuing to make progress on linking multiple chips together to exponentially increase its computing power. This will speed up the rate at which the AI system can “learn” the surroundings and make decisions.
The main takeaway seemed to be that Tesla engineers are still working on making incremental improvements to long-term projects. For now, it seems like most of the excitement will continue to come from Musk’s Twitter feed and the race to buy a new Tesla, many of which are already fully sold out for 2022.
You can watch a the full Tesla AI Day 2022 livestream in the video below: