Elon Musk announced that Tesla may have a working prototype of the Tesla Bot, also known as Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, before September 30 – the end of the third quarter of 2022.
Last month, Musk announced ‘Tesla AI Day # 2’ with ‘many cool updates’ on August 19th.
The original “Tesla AI Day” held last year was an event focusing on the company’s self-driving program. The automaker also unveiled its Dojo supercomputer and announced plans for the humanoid robot “Tesla Bot” – now known as the Tesla Optimus.
AI Day # 2 was to be held a year to the day after the first, but Musk took to Twitter today to postpone the event until September 30th.
As a reason for the delay, the CEO said that Tesla may have a working prototype of Optimus at the time:
When Musk first announced the project last year, Musk said Tesla would have a working prototype by the end of 2022, and recently the CEO even said the company aims to start production of the robot in 2023.
This is an extremely ambitious timeline for such an ambitious project, but Musk said on several occasions that it has become a priority.
In January, the CEO said that Tesla will prioritize product development of the Optimus humanoid robot in 2022 over other products.
Tesla plans to leverage its existing expertise in power electronics and electric vehicle batteries to build the robot and use its AI expertise to give it a brain.
Musk said the robot would initially be programmed to perform simple and repetitive tasks, including in manufacturing operations like Tesla’s own.
Tesla plans to improve the robot over time and be able to perform a wider range of tasks that will make it useful for both commercial and consumer applications.
If successful, the project could have a massive impact on economies, which explains why Tesla has shifted its focus to it.
Most recently, Musk has even claimed that Tesla could play a role in making Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) a reality through the humanoid robot project.
It sounds like we should learn a lot more about it on September 30th.
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