Elon Musk took to social media to express his agreement with a fellow tech leader’s prediction that there will be about 1 billion humanoid robots on Earth in two decades.
Musk took to X, formerly Twitter, to concur with the prediction made by David Holz, the founder of artificial intelligence (AI) research lab Midjourney. Holz said in a post last week that “we should be expecting a billion humanoid robots on earth in the 2040s and a hundred billion (mostly alien) robots throughout the solar system in the 2060s.”
Musk replied, “Probably something like that, provided the foundations of civilization are stable.”
Tesla, one of the companies Musk founded, has developed a prototype humanoid robot that the billionaire may view as contributing to humanity reaching that lofty prediction two decades from now.
Elon Musk’s humanoid robot: The Tesla Optimus
The Tesla Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, was first announced at the company’s AI Day event in August 2021 when Musk said the company planned to build a prototype by the following year. He said of the robot at the time, “I think it has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.”
At an event in October 2022, Musk said that he hopes to eventually make millions of the Optimus robots, which would carry an estimated $20,000 price tag per unit – though the robot was limited in its capabilities and Musk said after it walked on stage that he wouldn’t ask it to do more complicated tasks because he “didn’t want it to fall on its face.”
“There’s still a lot of work to be done to refine Optimus,” Musk said at the time. “I think Optimus is going to be incredible in five or 10 years.”
As of 2022, Musk said he hoped to bring the robot to market in three to five years and that once ready it will be “an extremely capable” machine.
He told Reuters that while making humanoid robots isn’t “directly in line with accelerating sustainable energy” as part of Tesla’s overarching goal, “I think the mission does somewhat broaden with the advent of Optimus to – you know, I don’t know: making the future awesome.”
In 2023 Tesla released a video showing the progress it has made with the humanoid robot which continues to be developed behind the scenes.
The clip shows Optimus slowly walking around a Tesla facility and at one stage, it shows how it is training the bot’s AI systems with human demonstrations. This is shown by a Tesla engineer picking up objects from one box and placing them into another. Optimus is able to mimic the task with its human-like hands.