Top line
Elon Musk confirmed Thursday that Tesla could begin selling its Optimus humanoid robot by the end of next year and predicted it could lead the automaker to a $25 trillion valuation, another ambitious claim from the billionaire which, according to experts, could well be within the realm of possibility. but the company is very unlikely to make money in the near future.
Elon Musk promoted Tesla’s Optimus robot after releasing its earnings report on Tuesday.
Highlights
Optimus, which is still under development, will go into production next year and the company could have as many as “a few thousand” units in operation at its factories, Musk said at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. the company in Texas, doubling a very ambitious goal. timeline of the bot it launched earlier this year.
Musk, who has described himself as “pathologically optimistic” and has a history of making bold statements about his companies not coming to fruition, has previously said he believes Tesla is “best positioned of all the manufacturers of humanoid robots” to produce robots at scale and believes they could become by far the company’s most valuable asset and, by all accounts, valuable enough to increase Tesla’s market capitalization more than 40-fold.
Animesh Garg, an assistant professor of AI robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said Forbes Musk’s timeline was “aggressive” but “realistic from a pure publishing perspective,” but said the question would be “to what extent Are the skills from the project useful? box”, particularly with regard to scope, generalizability and robustness.
For the launch, Garg said he would expect Tesla to have a humanoid platform with limbs, although it is unclear how sturdy and useful the hands will be, but it would be surprised if Optimus could perform tasks beyond competent locomotion and skills like picking up objects that aren’t complicated to understand, with other features like interacting with objects like windows and doors that will possibly follow a year or two later.
Jonathan Aitken, a roboticist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, agreed that “Musk’s timetable would be very difficult” and described 2025 as “ambitious but not out of the question”, saying much depends “on the details of what Exactly “. Musk suggests for his applications.
Christian Hubicki, a robotics professor at Florida State University, said he “wouldn’t be shocked to see carefully prepared video demonstrations of an Optimus performing some nominal tasks in a factory” by the end of the year, but warned that it would be “incredibly difficult” to get the robots into the hands of customers who will find them useful at that time.
What we don’t know
Hubicki said there are several unknowns surrounding humanoid robots from Tesla and competitors like Boston Dynamics and Figure AI that are key to assessing their potential for real-world use outside of glitzy, carefully staged demonstration videos. scene. The first of these is reliability, he said, adding that “the only useful robot is a reliable robot.” Hubicki said this “presents a problem for humanoids,” whose control is still in the laboratory phase and the hardware is fragile. “Are they going to work 90% of the time? 99%? How many 9s are enough before they are no longer useful in your production line and become complicated to repair and maintain? These are the numbers I would like to know from a humanoid company.
What is the point of humanoid robots?
Most of the built world is designed for humans and humanoid robots, by design, are well suited to this. Although environments and work tasks may be difficult to navigate for robots equipped with wheels or other designs, a humanoid could well thrive and undertake types of work that would otherwise be limited to humans or robots. very specific machines. The design imposes a number of formidable technical challenges, both at the hardware and software levels, including tasks that most humans take for granted, such as moving and grasping objects. The current AI boom is helping to advance the field, Aitken said, because generalizability is crucial to making humanoid tools viable. “We can’t program a robot to pick up 1,000 different objects by programming a process for each one individually,” he explained.
To monitor
It’s hard to imagine that Musk’s claim that Optimus will one day eclipse Tesla’s other products will come true at some point in the near future, robotics experts told Forbes, particularly its cars. For his part, Musk didn’t provide a timeline for the enormous growth Optimus hopes to catalyze. Garg said that humanoids are “unlikely to be cash flow positive in the near future” and that despite the hype, they do not have a compelling use case like other emerging technologies like cars without driver. They “probably won’t come close to the auto sector in terms of revenue” over the next decade, he said. Aitken told Forbes “it’s hard to imagine a humanoid seriously competing with the big industrial players in the sector” and wondered whether it would be able to do the kind of work that is “high-value, boring, dirty and dangerous” which would motivate a company to invest. Hubicki said he “wouldn’t bet on anything close to the auto market for the foreseeable future.” Although humanoid robots have “advanced impressively” in recent years, he said they lack a compelling use case to suggest “a massive market is imminent” and they remain for the foreseeable future. moment “complex technology to accomplish tasks that we can already do better.”
Chief Spokesperson
Analyst Gordon Johnson, of GLJ Research, said Musk’s claims were “absurd” and dismissed his 2025 year-end target for Optimus as “complete nonsense and borderline investor fraud.” Johnson said companies that have been working on humanoids for decades are nowhere near “where Musk claims he will be by the end of 2025.” Optimus is a “dream stock pump,” Johnson said. “There is no product.”
Forbes Rating
Musk is the richest person in the world and has a net worth of $210.7 billion. Much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla, including compensation worth tens of billions of dollars that a Delaware judge overturned. Tesla and Musk plan to contest the decision and shareholders voted to ratify the deal, a move that could eventually help the company restore Musk’s compensation package. The matter is far from legally settled, however, and experts say the situation has taken Musk, Tesla and the Delaware legal system into uncharted waters.
Large number
6 billion dollars. This is what analysts at Goldman Sachs predict the global market for humanoid robots could reach in the next 10 to 15 years. The robotics market as a whole will be worth $218 billion by 2030, according to research and analytics firm GlobalData.
Further reading