Tesla's Optimus

Elon Musk’s gamble: is robotics a manufacturing problem or an AI problem?

Chapter 8 of A Brief History of Embodied Intelligence

"We iterate every week. That's the Musk way, don't aim for perfect launches, aim for rapid iteration." — Tesla engineer

On August 19, 2021, at Tesla’s AI Day, Elon Musk announced that the company would build a humanoid robot.

The presentation was, by any reasonable measure, absurd. A person in a spandex…