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Elon Musk thinks Tesla’s (TSLA-3.33%) Optimus robot will be the “biggest product of all time” now that it can learn new tasks from human instruction.
Speaking at a conference, the CEO claimed Tesla is “the only company with all the ingredients for making intelligent humanoid robots at scale.”
“This is a super big deal,” Musk said, claiming no invention “will even be close” to making as big of an impact as Optimus. “I think it will be 10 times bigger than the next biggest product ever made, like that level.”
Tesla posted a video of Optimus following instructions, like picking up trash, opening a garbage bin and placing it in, or ripping a paper towel from a roll. It also showed the robot vacuuming, stirring a pot, and doing basic assembly that mimicked a Tesla Model X factory line.
Milan Kovac, an Optimus engineer at Tesla, wrote on X that “one of our goals is to have Optimus learn straight from internet videos of humans doing tasks.”
Kovac said the company recently had a “breakthrough” and Optimus “can now transfer a big chunk of the learning directly from human videos to the bots,” which accelerated its learning.
Musk has said he believes Tesla’s future is in robots, both for Optimus and its robotaxis.
He told CNBC that he expected to have Optimus robots working in Tesla’s factory by the end of the year.
“And we expect to scale Optimus up faster than any product, I think, in history, to get to millions of units per year as soon as possible,” he added, saying it would take four to five years to be able to do that.
Musk predicts demand for the robots “will be insatiable.”