Ahead of Tuesday's earnings, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the automaker will begin selling its humanoid robot Optimus in 2026. In fact, Optimus has already began to perform tasks autonomouslyhow to handle batteries, at one of Tesla's facilities, according to its earnings report.
“Tesla will have really useful humanoid robots in low production for internal Tesla use next year and hopefully in high production for other companies in 2026,” the executive said. published in X.
During Tuesday's earnings call, Musk also estimated that long-term demand for general-purpose humanoid robots is “in excess of 20 billion units,” a figure he arrived at by combining the 8 billion people on Earth who will apparently want one with industrial use cases.
These dates, though, are very broad, and such estimates should be taken with a grain of salt. A lot can happen with the schedule between now and then, and if Optimus is delayed, it wouldn't be the first time a Musk product has been affected by a dynamic schedule. Very early on, Musk suggested that production of the humanoid could will start in 2023.
We know that Tesla has invested a lot of resources in this project. As former leader of Tesla Optimus Chris Walti recently told me, “And then Elon[Musk]said, ‘We should build a humanoid. ’ My team was chosen to lead it. I led the internal hiring effort for that team. Everything you saw at AI Day was a product of those efforts.” He added that “at some point,[Optimus]became the number one effort in the company.”
The market has also changed substantially since the unveiling of the spandex-clad 2021 Optimus. Some have even credited Tesla’s announcement with motivating some major competitors to reveal their own efforts sooner than they otherwise would have.
Broadly speaking, robotics benefited from the pandemic. Staff shortages led to an influx of investment and a renaissance of sorts in industrial automation. More recently, an explosion of interest in generative AI has further accelerated the industry and the push toward “general purpose” robots.
However, as impressive as the demonstrations may be, there is still much work to be done between current systems and general-purpose bots. The gap between ChatGPT’s current offerings and synthetic systems that can operate and learn like humans is much larger than it might initially appear.
To a large extent, this is a software and AI problem, but there is also a lot of work to be done to create mechatronic systems that can perform these actions on a large scale. Increasingly, the industry is looking to the humanoid factor to fill that gap. We have designed the world for people, so why not design robots for that world?
Tesla was not the first company to start working on a humanoid form factor (nor, based on available evidence, is it the one that has made the most progress). But while being first to market carries weight in this high-tech space, we are at the very beginning of the humanoid robot story.
Some of the companies listed below won't make it, and others we've never heard of could take their place. Here's the situation as of July 2024.
1X
This Norwegian startup made a big splash in 2023 with a $23.5 million funding round. The list of investors was even more impressive than the dollar amount, with backing from Tiger Global and, in particular, OpenAI. It represented a significant vote of confidence from the GPT maker and signaled its interest in a physical incarnation for its platforms.
In January, 1X announced A $100 million Series B and has more recently hired some big names from companies such as BMW and Tesla. Recent Videos They have presented their wheeled robot with a smiling face, Eve, which responds to voice commands and performs household tasks such as cleaning.
It is worth noting that the company's name is a reference to its commitment to demonstrating its robots at 1X speed. Not labeling the accelerated video is one of the a series of tricks Companies can use this to make their projects appear more advanced than they actually are.
Agility
Agility joined the initiative, and as a result, the company’s signature bipedal robot, Digit, has taken further steps toward commercialization than any other in the industry. After pilot testing with a number of different partners, including Amazon, the company announced in June that its humanoid was the first to move forward. Beyond the pilot phase.
Digit's first real job isn't glamorous, though to some extent that's the point of this exercise. The robot has begun moving plastic containers around a Spanx factory in Georgia.
Apptronik Application
This Austin-based company has been working on humanoids for some time now, courtesy of its Valkyrie's partnership with NASAIn March, the company announced that it had begun Warehouse pilots with Mercedes-Benz.
Boston Dynamics
Boston Dynamics is both the original and the new kid on the block. The original Atlas Hydraulics dates back to 2013. removed the system in Aprilonly for An electric version will debut a day laterThe strength and flexibility of the system's actuators had many in the industry listening.
So far, we’ve only seen a 40-second video of the robot in action. At the time, CEO Robert Playter told TechCrunch that its parent company, Hyundai, planned to start testing the robot in factories sometime in 2025, with full-scale production still a few years away.
Figure
In February, Figure announced a big $675 million in revenue from investors including Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Nvidia and Intel Capital. The round valued the South Bay firm at $2.6 billion after the investment. Earlier this year, Figure announced that its 01 The robot was to be tested at a BMW factory In South Carolina. A video An image of the robot in that environment debuted earlier this month.
Sanctuary IA
In April, Sanctuary AI announced what was it Automaker Magna is currently conducting pilot tests. Phoenix is Sanctuary AI’s first humanoid that walks on two legs. An earlier model had already been deployed at a retailer in its native Canada.
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