Tesla successfully held its AI Day 2 on September 30th. A working prototype of the Optimus Bot was revealed including many updates shared by Tesla. Elon Musk stated that the point of AI Day is to show the “immense depth and breadth of Tesla in AI, compute hardware, and robotics.” Which makes Tesla unique compared to other automakers.
While automakers are focused on manufacturing vehicles, Tesla focuses on various industries, including vehicle manufacturing, energy, and robotics. As the event ended, Musk stated that Tesla was going to hold these AI days more regularly, every year, or possibly a monthly podcast. He said, “We’ll try to do this every year and we might do a monthly podcast, even. I think it would be great to bring you along for the ride and show you what cool things are happening.”
A monthly podcast from Tesla would add to their marketing aspects and could reveal announcements through these podcasts. Full Self-driving and AI would enable the company to help fight some of the constant misinformation that’s often prevalent. Another aspect is that Tesla now has 160,000 FSD customers. It implies that Tesla has more data for the AI to learn from. A year ago, this was only 2,000 customers. The numbers are expected to increase by next year to 250,000.
Other updates
Tesla also provided an update on its Dojo supercomputer. Last year, Tesla revealed the Dojo’s first chip and training tiles that it would later develop into an ExaPod. Last night, Tesla announced that the first ExaPod is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2023. The dojo is expected to increase Tesla’s auto labeling output and this will be the company’s first Exapod out of 7 that it plans to build in Palo Alto.
Musk estimated that the humanoid robot’s deliveries could start in around 3-5 years. Tesla revealed as much during its presentation, noting that Optimus’ development platform was only pushed around February 2022. And today, just about eight months later, Tesla is already busy developing an Optimus prototype with custom actuators. Tesla would definitely have to face a lot of challenges before it can successfully deliver Optimus to consumers. The company would have to refine the design of the robot and optimize it to a degree where it’s profitable. Tesla would also have to build a facility that will likely be dedicated to Optimus production. It remains to be seen where Tesla would do this, though facilities like Giga Texas certainly have the space for a humanoid robot plant.
