Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company plans to start using humanoid robots next year.
“Tesla will be producing a small number of truly useful humanoid robots for our own internal use next year, and then hopefully mass producing them for other companies in 2026,” Musk wrote on Twitter on Monday morning.
Tesla plans to build a small number of truly useful humanoid robots for its own internal use next year, and then mass-produce them for other companies, hopefully as soon as 2026.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2024
Like many of Musk’s attention-grabbing comments, this one came in response to a post by another user featuring a chart showing predictions by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo about progress in artificial intelligence (AI).
Musk told investors in April that Tesla’s humanoid robot project, Optimus, “will be in our factories by the end of the year doing useful work. Optimus will be worth more than everything else Tesla does combined.”
In the same earnings call, the CEO promised “sentient humanoid robots that can navigate the real world and perform tasks on the fly. They’re coming. And Tesla is in the best position of any robotics maker to achieve mass production through efficient inference on the robots themselves.”
A few weeks earlier, Musk had said the company would debut its robot taxis on August 8, something he’d been promising since 2019.
Tesla’s self-driving car efforts have hit a deadlock recently, with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asking the company for more information about its self-driving system after a series of crashes despite a December recall of more than 2 million vehicles.
The Justice Department is also investigating whether Tesla committed securities and wire fraud by misleading investors and consumers about the self-driving features of its electric vehicles.
“But while the open road presents some challenges for autonomous solutions, the closed-loop ecosystem of warehouses and distribution centers provides another realm for innovative technologies to come into play,” PYMNTS wrote in May.
May Mobility CFO Anna Brunell said in February: “I think that in our lifetimes, not just cars but every moving machine on the planet will be automated, and the smart infrastructure that monitors and supports it will be automated as well.”
The market is responding to both the needs and opportunities presented by autonomous vehicles, with companies such as Figure partnering with BMW to bring general-purpose robots to the automotive manufacturing environment.
Meanwhile, Walmart has quietly begun to transform its distribution centers by rolling out 19 autonomous electric forklifts across four facilities, marking major advancements in its use of AI-powered robots in industrial workplaces.
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