Elon Musk Wants To Sell You an Optimus Robot for Less Than the Price of a Tesla

Oct 1, 2022

Tech

Speaker 1: Tesla’s optimist. Robot is real, and Elon Musk wants to sell it to you for £20,000. We got our first look at the so called Tesla bot at Tesla’s 2022 AI Day.

Essentially a big showcase of the work the company is doing in robotics, ai, and driverless technology. Among all the talk of AI Optimist was the highlight of the show, but we didn’t just get one robot. We actually saw two.

The first reveal was an early development prototype [00:00:30] that actually walked itself out on stage and waved. Then we got a second robot, the latest generation that Elon Musk wants to take into production. Tesla was selling a big vision, robots working in our world, doing jobs, and even having their own personalities.

But how long till we get that future? And more importantly, will you be able to buy an optimist robot, or is this just really cool looking vaporware? Let’s break it down.

Speaker 1: [00:01:00] We first saw Optimist at last year’s AI day, but all we’ve seen in the real world till now was a human dancing in a morph suit. But at this year’s AI day, we got a lot more starting with that first reveal compared to the slick renders we’ve seen before. This robot looked a little more steam park with exposed wires and actuators and a back that looked kind of unfinished.

But [00:01:30] according to Tesla, this early model was finished within six months of last year’s AI day. It was built with off the shelf parts, and this was the first time it had walked in the real world without any tethers or cables. Oh, and because this was an Elon Musk event, it did some dancing too, but Tesla didn’t stop there.

And that brings us to robot number two. This latest generation version of Optimist was a little less showy, but this is the version that Tesla [00:02:00] wants to actually mass produce. Speaker 2: Our goal is to make, um, a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible.

You’ve all seen very impressive humanoid, uh, robot demonstrations, um, and that that’s great. But what are they missing? Um, they’re missing a brain.

They, they, they don’t have the, the intelligence to navigate the world, uh, by themselves. And they’re, they’re also very expensive, um, and made in low volume. Um, whereas, uh, this, this is optimist is designed to [00:02:30] in extremely capable robot, but made in, in very high volume, probably ultimately millions of units.

Um, and I, it, it, it is expected to cost much less than a car. I just bring it directly to the right here. Uh, I would say probably less than £20,000.

Speaker 1: So what does 20 grand get you? Well, this newer robot is built with components designed by Tesla, not off the shelf parts, and it has 200 degrees of freedom across its whole body. That means opposable thumbs and independently [00:03:00] moving fingers, and the ability to grab tools or climb stairs.

It weighs 73 kilos and it has wifi. Nice optimist 2.0 had to be wheeled on stage, but Musk says it should be walking in a few weeks. So while the onstage demos were limited, we did get to see some pre-recorded videos of the robot working in the real world, optimist, lifting boxes, watering plants, and even working in one of Tesla’s factories. [00:03:30] We also got a whole lot of really specific details on the mechanics of this machine.

Everything from the dexterity of the fingers to the biomechanics of knee design. That’s something I know about now. Speaker 1: Before this event, Musk said AI day would be highly technical, and he was not lying.

But probably the most interesting part was how the robot understands the world. We got to see what the robot sees with color coded image recognition [00:04:00] as it recognized objects and navigated through spaces. And this is where Tesla’s work in robotics and self-driving cars comes together to create the optimist robot brain.

Tesla took its existing self-driving car AI and retrained it for a world off the road. So instead of detecting nearby cars or pedestrians, this robot is trained to detect things like factory parts or humans in the real world. And Elon [00:04:30] Musk wants to see these robots in the real world with different jobs, different skins and looks, and even different personalities.

But when will we see it in the real world? Well, this is nascent technology and the demos we got were pretty limited lifting boxes or doing simple tasks. Getting AI to work within tight boundaries is very different from sending a robot home to mom and dad for Christmas.

But Tesla [00:05:00] is clearly pretty serious about making a reality.

And there’s no doubt that what we got from AI day in 2022 was a huge leap forward from last year when we got a human dancing in a morph suit.

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