Tesla CEO Elon Musk presents the first version of his Bumble-C robot, which aims to build a “prosperous future”, during Tesla’s Artificial Intelligence Day.
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Elon Musk Presents Tesla’s New Robot That “Change Civilization”
On Friday, Elon Musk presented two prototypes of the humanoid robot “Optimus”, which his company Tesla hopes to produce “in the millions” one day, in order to “change civilization” and build a “prosperous future” in which poverty disappears.
Bumble C, a first version of the robot, cautiously entered a California theater where Tesla AI Day held the annual Tesla AI Day conference on the company’s AI progress. The robot drew a salute by hand, and appeared in a video clip bringing a package to an employee and watering the plants.
WATCH: Elon Musk unveils Optimus robot during Tesla’s AI Day 2022 https://t.co/uv6ycIKggg pic.twitter.com/h0WdwtOwye
— Bloomberg (@business) October 1, 2022
Staff also brought in a more advanced Optimus prototype, which has fewer exposed cables but is not yet able to walk on its own.
Elon Musk acknowledged that other parties have designed more advanced robots, but “they lack the brains and do not have the intelligence to move on their own (…) and they are very expensive,” he said.
Real life iron man and Optimus Bot are going to be a force to be reckoned with @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/0Rv72CjN0P
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 1, 2022
The Tesla boss aims to develop a robot that will eventually sell for “likely less than $20,000” and be designed to be made in “millions of units”.
The conference seeks to recruit more engineers to achieve this goal, thus “transforming civilization in depth”.
In 2021, the billionaire presented this project for a robot that can perform repetitive tasks instead of humans.
Teslas Bot is going to remove the utterly most painful repetitive tasks in every industry. It’ll make things super efficient. I can only imagine how much efficiency the production line at Tesla will become. @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/IyE0l8fYFD
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 1, 2022
A future free of poverty
“This means a prosperous future without poverty, in which people will have the products and services they want,” Musk said.
Elon Musk emphasized that “a lot of people think we’re just a modern manufacturer,” but that Tesla is also a “pioneer in artificial intelligence.”
Analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities said Musk had “faced a wave of skepticism” since announcing he had built a humanoid robot.
“The market is focused on improving batteries, on the production capacities of new factories (which Tesla opened in Berlin and Austin), and on competition from all sides for electric cars. Not on humanoid robots,” he added.
Musk is also divisive regarding self-driving vehicles, which he has been saying for years his company will soon launch. A California agency filed a complaint in August once morest Tesla, accusing it of lying regarding the technologies.
“A moral obligation”
But Elon Musk says his products have fared the best in safety tests. “There is a moral obligation to deploy (a self-driving system) if it reduces the number of accidents and deaths,” he said.
“Even if we’re going to see lawsuits and criticism, people whose lives are saved don’t know it, when people die or sometimes get injured, states will realize if there’s a problem with the autonomous system,” he said.
Elon Musk plans to test the Optimus robot at the group’s factory in California to prove its usefulness. He hopes that one day the bot will be “friendly” and that chatting with it will be “normal”. He also promised safety features to avoid a “Terminator”-like scenario.
According to Musk, it is necessary to list the company that makes this robot on the stock exchange, “because if the public doesn’t like what Tesla is doing, they can buy shares and vote differently.”
“It is very important that I do not do what I want,” he added, laughing, in a comment referring to the judicial dispute in which he is facing Twitter, and a trial is scheduled for his background in the middle of this month.
Elon Musk signed a contract to acquire the social network in the spring, before reconsidering his decision in July, prompting the giant platform to sue him to force him to honor his commitment.
The world’s richest man said he wanted to make Twitter a private (unlisted) company, so it would escape any outside control.
