"Whatever humans don't want to do, OPTIMUS will do" – Elon Musk
On August 19, 2021, on Tesla AI Day, Elon Musk announced that he was developing a humanoid robot — at the time — called Tesla Bot (read more about designboom here). According to Tesla's CEO, the robot will run on the same artificial intelligence used by Tesla's self-driving fleet and will help humans by handling unsafe, repetitive and boring daily tasks.
About a year later, Elon Musk spoke about the robot again at a Cyber Rodeo event in Texas, this time under the nickname Optimus Sub-Prime. He explained his priorities for the project and said the project will go into production in 2023.
"Anything humans don't want to do, Optimus Prime will do," Musk said on stage. "It may be hard to imagine, but as you can see, the development of Optimus Prime — we're going to make sure it's safe and there's no Terminator or anything like that — how it's going to really change the world to a bigger extent than a car." I think we have a chance to make the first edition, hopefully next year.
At present, Tesla has not yet announced a working prototype of the robot, and it is not clear what stage of development it is. The robot shown at the Cyber Rodeo event has the same proportions as humans: it's 5 feet 8 (172 cm) tall and weighs 125 pounds (56 kilograms). This allows it to operate in the environment that humans have created for humanity.
In a conversation with Axel Springer CEO Mathias D Pfner, Musk further explained his plans, saying the robot will be a humanoid robot focused on the general, and he hopes we will be able to download our brain features into it, including our personalities.
"We can download what we think makes us so unique," Musk continued. "Now, of course, if you're no longer in that body, it's definitely going to be different, but in terms of preserving our memories and personalities, I think we can do it."