Elon Musk on Optimus: We'll build over 1 billion robots a year | Lex Fridman Podcast

training computer is kind of like the engine how manyan this horsepower of the engine so you really you want to try to do the best on that and you then um then how efficiently do you use

that training compute and how efficiently do you do the inference the uh use of the AI um so obvious that comes down to human Talent um and then

what unique access to data do you have uh that's also plays a plays a role think Twitter data will be useful uh yeah I mean I think I think most of the

leading AI companies already have already scraped uh all the Twitter data not I think they have um so I on a

go forward basis what's useful is is is the fact that it's up to the second you know that's the because it's hard for them to scrap in real time so there's there's

a an immediacy advantage that Gro has already I think with Tesla and and the realtime video coming from several million cars ultimately tens of millions

of cars with Optimus there might be hundreds of millions of Optimus robots maybe billions learning a tremendous amount from The Real World uh that's

that's the the biggest source of data I think ultimately is is sort of Optimus probably is Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data because it's because reality

scales reality scales to the scale of reality um it's actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate um but really

you say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated where on a non duplicative like discounting spam

and repetitive stuff it's not a huge number you run out pretty quickly and Optimus can go so Tesla cars can are

unfortunately have to on the road uh Optimus robot can go anywhere there's more reality off the road and go off road I mean like thought Rob can like pick up the cup and see did it pick

up the cup in the right way did it yeah you know say you pour water in the cup you know did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup did it spill water or

not yeah um simple stuff like that I mean but it can do at that at scale times a billion you know so generate use

useful data from reality so cause and effect stuff what do you think it takes to get to mass production of humanoid robots like that it's the same as cars

really I mean Global capacity for vehicles um is about 100 million a year and uh it it could be higher just that the

demand is on the order of 100 million a year and then there's roughly 2 billion uh vehicles that are in use in some way so which makes sense like the the life of a vehicle is about 20 years so at

steady state you can have 100 million Vehicles produced a year with a with a 2 billion vehicle Fleet roughly um now for humanoid robots the utility is much

greater so my guess is human robots are more like at a billion plus per year but you know until you came along and started uh building Optimus it it was

thought to be an extremely difficult problem I mean still extremely yes it's no walk in the park I mean op Optimus currently would struggle to have to walk

in the park I mean it can walk in a not too difficult but it will be able to walk um over a wide range of terrain yeah and pick up objects yeah yeah they

can already do that but like all kinds of objects yeah yeah all foreign objects I mean pouring water in a cup it's not trivial cuz then if you don't know anything about the container could be

all kinds of ERS yeah there's going to be an immense amount of engineering just going into the hand yeah the hand might be it might be close to half of all the

engineering in the in Optimus from an electromechanical standpoint the hand is probably roughly half of the engineering but so much of the intelligence so much

the intelligence of humans goes into what we do with our hands yeah the manipulation of the world manipulation of objects in the world intelligent safe manipulation of objects in the world yeah yeah

I mean you start really thinking about your hand and how it works you know I do all the time the sensory control of mulus is we have humongous hands yeah so I mean like your

hands the actuators the muscles of your hand are almost overwhelmingly in your forearm mhm so your forearm has the has the muscles that that actually control your hand um there there's a there's a

few small muscles in the hand itself but your hand is really um like a skeleton meat puppet and and and with cables that so the the muscles that control your

fingers are in your forearm and they go through your the carpal tunnel which is that you've got a little collection of Bones and in a tiny tunnel that the that

these cables the tendons go through and those tendons are what um mostly what movees your hands and something like those tendons has to be re engineered

into the Optimus in order to do all that kind of stuff yeah so like the current Optimus um we tried putting the actuators in the hand itself but then you you sort of end up having these like giant hands yeah giant hands that look

weird yeah um and then they they don't actually have enough degrees of freedom and or enough strength so so you realize oh okay that's why you got to put the

actuators in the forearm and and just like a human you got to run cables uh through a narrow tunnel to operate the the fingers and then there's also a

reason for not having all the fingers uh the same length so it wouldn't be expensive from an energy or evolutionary standpoint to have all your fingers be the same length so why AR they the same length yeah why not because it's actually better to have different

lengths your dexterity is better if you've got fingers of different length you you're you have there are more things you can do and your your dexterity is actually better if your

fingers are different different length like there's a reason you got a little finger like why don't I have a little finger that's bigger yeah because it allows you to do fine it helps you with fine motor skills that this little

finger helps it does H if you lost your little finger it would have noticeably less dexterity so as you're figuring out this problem you have to also figure out a way to do it

so you can Mass manufacture it so it's to be as simple as possible it's actually going to be quite complicated I the the the the as possible part is it's quite a high bar if you want to have a

humanoid robot that can um do things that a human can do it's actually it's a very high bar so our new arm has 22 degrees of freedom and instead of 11 and has the like I said the actuators in the

forearm um and these all all the actuators are designed from scratch the from physics first principles um that the sensors are all design from scratch and and we we we'll continue to put um

tremendous amount of engineering effort into improving the hand like the Hand by by hand I mean like the the entire forearm from elbow forward MH uh is is really the hand

um so that's um incredibly difficult engineering actually and um and so then so the

simplest possible version of a humanid robot that can do even most perhaps not all of what a human can do is actually still very

complicated it's not it's not simple it's very difficult