Will there be over 1000 Optimus robots working at Tesla before 2026?
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“My prediction is next year we’ll have over a thousand, maybe a few thousand, Optimus robots working at Tesla.”

https://x.com/SmokeAwayyy/status/1801400924096839732

This was a prediction made during the Tesla 2024 Annual Stockholder Meeting.

I take "working" to mean autonomously deployed in factories and performing productive labor.

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Isn't this incredibly likely? There are 140,000 salaried workers at Tesla as of 2023, only a few thousand of these are engineers, most are in assembly roles within factories.
If you take the simplest 1% of tasks (not jobs, just tasks) then you can introduce robotic labor for ~170-200 workers in each of their 6 factories and hit this target.
If these bots simply move boxes between shelves and perform other minimally complex actions they are likely to hit this number.
There's also a strong incentive to do so as a way of gathering training data for the Optimus platform.

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Another data point for context: Amazon already has 750,000+ robots working in their fulfillment centers.

1,000 doesn't seem hard to hit at all; I think this is just a market on whether Optimus will be minimally usable by 2026.

Yeah that's exactly my thinking, the Agility Robotics models are doing minimally useful work today and don't appear dramatically ahead of recent Optimus demos.

The main problem is that basically wherever you can use humanoid robots, you'll improve efficiency and reduce cost by using a different shape. Also the safety aspects of humanoid robots are terrible. Do you want a potentially unstable several hundred kg hard thing moving freely around humans? No? Then you lose the last advantage of human shape. So to me the most likely scenario for a YES resolution is Tesla doing that as a marketing gimmick and/or to use the robots nobody wants to buy.

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