Tesla CEO Elon Musk likened the training of the Optimus humanoid robot to raising a toddler. He said Tesla is building an "Optimus Academy" and expects to begin delivering the robot to consumers by the end of 2027.
Tesla is sending Optimus back to school. On Wednesday's earnings call, CEO Elon Musk compared training the humanoid robot to raising a toddler.
Optimus has to learn by playing
Musk said Tesla's autonomous driving models can learn from data collected by its fleet of vehicles. Optimus, by contrast, has to learn by watching people do tasks and practicing them itself, a process similar to how humans learn.
Children learn by playing, Musk told investors, and he argued that Tesla needs Optimus to play at scale to become good at real-world tasks.
An academy for 10,000 or 20,000 robots
Tesla is building an Optimus Academy where prototypes can practice a wide range of tasks and generate training data for future versions. Musk said he thinks the company needs to make on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots and have them do self-play to get the data it needs.
Tesla also said it had begun production of Optimus at its Fremont factory. Musk said the company expects to begin delivering the robot to customers by the end of next year.
Production to be bumpy
Musk cautioned that production would be "somewhat bumpy", according to Business Insider, and that development still has some way to go. He listed durable yet responsive robotic hands and AI capable of handling open-ended tasks among the main hurdles.
Tesla is not alone in this approach. Texas-based Apptronik has also set up "data factories" where robots load conveyor belts and sort objects to generate training data and address a shortage of it.
Source: Business Insider
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
