Elon Musk first gave a timeline for the production of the Tesla Optimus project, a humanoid robot that can do common tasks.
The CEO believes the company can put the ambitious project into production as early as next year. It’s an extremely ambitious schedule even for him.
When Tesla announced the “Tesla Bot” project at its A Day last year, Elon Musk presented it as something the company could do, using existing work and pieces from the development of self-driving technology, and when they don’t , someone else will.
It certainly didn’t sound like a priority for Tesla at the time, and many saw it primarily as a recruitment tool as the automaker looks to bolster its AI team to deliver its full self-driving system.
A few months later, the priority level of the project rose rapidly.
Musk announced that Tesla is now prioritizing product development of the Tesla Bot, which he now calls Optimus, over some of its upcoming vehicles in 2022.
The CEO seemed much more excited about the project and its potential to impact labor shortages and eventually the economy at large.
When the project was first announced, Tesla wanted to have a prototype of the humanoid robot ready by the end of 2022, but there was no word on a production timeline.
At today’s Tesla Cyber Rodeo event, Musk offered a production timeline for the first time, and it’s surprisingly aggressive even for him:
I think we have a chance to go into production for version 1 of Optimus hopefully next year.
Musk added during the event about Tesla Optimus:
It’s going to turn our idea of what the economy is on its head… it’s going to be able to do basically everything humans don’t want to do. It will do. It will bring an age of plenty. It might be hard to imagine, but if you see Optimus developing and we’ll make sure it’s safe, not Terminator stuff, it’s going to change the world to an even greater degree than cars.
This follows increasing excitement from the CEO about the project over the past few months.
In January, Musk said that Tesla could play a role in making artificial general intelligence (AGI) a reality through the humanoid robot project.
Then, a few weeks later, we reported on Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s AI Director, stating that he “believes ‘Tesla Bot’ is on track to become the most powerful AI development platform.”
It sounds like the project quickly went from something Tesla “could do so well” to a “world-changing endeavor” that’s now a top priority for the company.
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