Elon Musk announced that Tesla may start selling its Optimus humanoid robot next year. The automaker plans to use the robot in its own factory by the end of the year.
A few months ago, Tesla unveiled “Optimus Gen 2”, a new generation of its humanoid robot that should be able to take over repetitive tasks from humans.
The new prototype showed a lot of improvements compared to previously underwhelming versions of the robot, and it gave some credibility to the project, which was laughed off by many when first announced with a dancer disguised as a robot for visual aid a few years ago.
Tesla believed it to be possible by leveraging its AI work on its self-driving vehicle program and expertise in batteries and electric motors. It argued that its vehicles are already robots on wheels. Now, it just needs to make them in humanoid forms to be able to replace humans in some tasks – primarily repetitive and dangerous tasks.
In a previous update on Optimus, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the “Optimus stuff is extremely underrated.” The CEO said that the demand could be as high as 10 to 20 billion units.
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