Tesla has begun early production of Optimus, its humanoid robot, on a high-volume line in Fremont, California. CEO Elon Musk also said on Tesla's earnings call Wednesday that the robot is a long way from finished.
The list of open problems was specific. Musk named the robot's hands, its safety, its reliability and durability, and the artificial intelligence needed to make it a productive tool. "There's still quite a lot of work to do with regard to the AI and the robot for it to be truly useful for open-ended tasks," he said. He then added a longer-range prediction: "At some point, there will be more humanoid robots on Earth than there are humans."
Those caveats cover most of what makes a robot worth buying. Hands determine whether it can handle real objects. Safety decides whether it can work near people. Reliability and durability decide whether it keeps working after the first few weeks. The AI is what turns a machine that can walk and wave into one that can do unscripted jobs. The remarks as described include no output target, price, customer or ship date.
That makes "in production" a narrower claim than it sounds. Starting a line is a real milestone, and building robots in volume is one way to find out what breaks, since lab demos rarely expose wear and failure rates. But it is a manufacturing step, not a statement that the product works. The distance between the two is Musk's own to-do list.
The "more robots than humans" line is a forecast with no date attached, and "at some point" does the heavy lifting. The nearer question is which gap closes slowest. Hardware problems like hands and durability tend to yield to iteration. Open-ended AI, the thing Musk singled out, is the part nobody has a schedule for.