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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.
Related questions
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.
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.