Elon Musk Says Coaching Tesla’s Optimus Is Like Elevating a Toddler

Tesla is sending its Optimus humanoid robot again to high school.

Speaking on the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk in contrast coaching the EV maker’s humanoid robotic to elevating a toddler.

Musk mentioned that whereas Tesla’s autonomous driving fashions can be taught from knowledge collected by its large fleet of autos, its Optimus robotic has to be taught by watching folks do duties and training them itself, a course of just like how people be taught.

“You can see this when you will have a toddler, they usually initially are type of wobbly, and they do not know learn how to do issues, and finally, they be taught to wipe their very own ass, which is an enormous milestone,” Musk instructed buyers.

“They be taught to learn and do all types of issues, they usually be taught this by taking part in. And we really need Optimus to play at scale with the intention to have it’s actually good at duties in the true planet,” Musk mentioned.

The Tesla CEO added that the corporate was constructing out an “Optimus Academy” the place prototypes can follow a variety of duties and generate coaching knowledge to show future variations of Optimus.

“For Optimus to get the coaching knowledge we’d like, we really must make a variety of Optimi. So we have to make, I feel, on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots after which have them do self-play,” mentioned Musk.

Tesla mentioned on Wednesday that it had begun production of Optimus at its Fremont manufacturing unit, with Musk saying the corporate expects to start delivering Optimus to clients by the top of subsequent yr.

The near-trillionaire cautioned that manufacturing can be “considerably bumpy” and that improvement of the humanoid robotic nonetheless has some strategy to go.

He listed the challenges of designing sturdy but responsive robotic hands, in addition to AI able to dealing with open-ended duties, among the many essential hurdles Tesla faces.

Tesla isn’t alone in establishing robotic academies to offer coaching knowledge for humanoid robots.

Unlike giant language fashions like ChatGPT, which have been educated on the huge corpus of textual content knowledge accessible on the web, robotics faces a shortage of real-world training data to show humanoids to navigate the bodily planet.

Other startups, comparable to Texas-based Apptronik, have additionally arrange “knowledge factories” the place robots load conveyor belts and type objects to generate coaching knowledge to fight the information scarcity.