Tag: Optimus Robot

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Elon Musk with Dwarkesh Patel & John Collison – The Future of AI is in Space – Part 11: Scaling Optimus Production and Competing with China (Full Transcript)

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In Part 11, Dwarkesh Patel and John Collison explore the synergies between xAI and Optimus, the difficulties of scaling humanoid robot production at volume, and whether America can realistically compete with China’s manufacturing power through robotics.

Transcript:

Synergies Between xAI and Optimus

Dwarkesh Patel asked how Elon thinks about the synergies between xAI and Optimus, especially since Grok could potentially act as a world model and higher-level intelligence for planning while lower-level motor policies handle execution.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, so you’d use GROK to orchestrate the behavior of the Optimus robots. So let’s say you wanted to build a factory, then Grok could organize the Optimus robots, give them, assign them tasks to build the factory, to produce whatever you want.”

John Collison asked whether this meant xAI and Tesla would eventually need to merge.

Elon Musk: “So what were we saying earlier about public company discussions?”

Scaling Optimus Production

Dwarkesh Patel asked what Elon still wants to see on the hardware side before moving to mass manufacturing of Gen 3 Optimus — better actuators or improved software.

Elon Musk: “No, we’re moving towards that.”

Dwarkesh followed up, asking if Ford-style manufacturing with current hardware was good enough and whether Elon just wanted to deploy as many as possible now.

Elon Musk: “I mean, it’s very hard to scale up production. But yeah, I think Optimus 3 is the right version of the robot to produce maybe something on the order of like a million units a year. I think you’d want to go to Optimus 4 before you went to 10 million units a year.”

John Collison confirmed whether a million units per year was achievable with Optimus 3.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, I mean, it’s very hard to spool up manufacturing. So manufacturing, the output per unit time always follows an S curve. So it starts off agonizingly slow, then has this sort of exponential increase, then linear, then a logarithmic outcome until you sort of eventually asymptote at some number.

Optimus initial production will be—it’s going to be a stretched out S curve because so much of what goes into Optimus is brand new. There’s not an existing supply chain. As I mentioned, the actuators, electronics, everything in the Optimus robot is designed for physics first principles. It’s not taken from a catalog. These are custom designed. Everything, literally everything. I don’t think there’s a single thing that—”

John Collison asked how far down the custom design goes.

Elon Musk: “I mean I guess we’re not making custom capacitors yet maybe, but there’s nothing you can pick out of a catalog at any price. So it just means that the Optimus S curve, the units per year output per unit time, how many Optimus robots you make per day, whatever, is going to initially ramp slower than a product where you have an existing supply chain. But it will get to a million.”

Competing with Chinese Humanoids

Dwarkesh Patel asked about Chinese humanoids like Unitree selling for $6K–$13K. He wondered whether Tesla aimed to match that price or if the Chinese robots were qualitatively different.

Elon Musk: “Well, our Optimus is designed to have a lot of intelligence and to have the same electromechanical dexterity if not higher than a human. So Unitree does not have that. And it’s also, I mean it’s quite a big robot. It has to carry heavy objects for long periods of time and not overheat or exceed the power of its actuators. So we’ve got—it’s 5’11”, this is pretty tall and it’s got a lot of intelligence. So it’s going to be more expensive than a small robot that is not intelligent.”

John Collison noted that Optimus would be more capable.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, not a lot more. I mean the thing is over time as Optimus robots build Optimus robots, the cost will drop very quickly.”

John Collison asked what the first billion Optimuses would do and what their highest and best use would be.

Elon Musk: “I think that you would start off with simple tasks that you can count on them doing well.”

John Collison asked whether that would be in homes or factories.

Elon Musk: “The best useful robots in the beginning will be any continuous operations, any 24/7 operation because then they can work continuously.”

Dwarkesh Patel asked what fraction of work currently done by humans at a Gigafactory a Gen 3 Optimus could handle.

Elon Musk: “I’m not sure. Maybe it’s like 10, 20%, maybe more, I don’t know. We would not reduce our headcount. We would for sure increase our headcount, to be clear, but we would increase our output. So the units produced per human—the total number of humans at Tesla will increase, but the output of robots and cars will increase disproportionately. The number of cars and robots produced per human will increase dramatically, but number of humans will increase as well.”

US-China Manufacturing and Policy

John Collison asked what policy changes Elon would make if he were in charge, referencing solar tariffs and permitting.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, I would say anything that is a limiting factor for electricity needs to be addressed, provided it’s not very bad for the environment.”

John Collison brought up export bans on chips and turbine engines and asked whether more should be considered.

Elon Musk: “Well, I think it’s important to appreciate that in most areas China is very advanced in manufacturing. There’s only a few areas where it is not. China is a manufacturing powerhouse next level.”

John Collison asked about supply chain dependence, specifically gallium refining.

Elon Musk: “Yeah, there’s rare earth stuff. Rare earths, which are, as you know, not rare. We actually do rare earth ore mining in the U.S., send the rock, we put it on a train and then put on a boat to China that goes on another train and goes to the rare earth refineries in China, who then refine it, put it into a magnet, put it into a motor sub assembly, and then send it back to America. So the thing we’re really missing is a lot of ore refining in America.”

John Collison asked whether this was worth policy intervention.

Elon Musk: “Yes, well, I think there are some things being done on that front, but we kind of need Optimus, frankly, to build ore refineries.”

The Robot Advantage

Dwarkesh Patel summarized that China’s main advantage is abundant skilled labor and that Optimus could help close that gap, but noted the concern that China might pull ahead in humanoid production first.

Elon Musk: “Right. You can close that recursive loop pretty quickly.”

John Collison asked if this could be done with a small number of Optimuses.

Elon Musk: “Yeah. So you close the recursive loop to help the robots build the robots, and then we can try to get to tens of millions of units a year. Maybe if you start getting to hundreds of millions of units a year, I think you’re going to be the most competitive country by far.

We definitely can’t win with just humans because China has four times our population. And frankly, America’s been winning for so long that just like a pro sports team that’s been running for a very long time tend to get complacent and entitled and that’s why they stop winning, because they don’t work as hard anymore.

So I think, frankly my observation is the average work ethic in China is higher than in the U.S. So it’s not just that there’s four times the population, but the amount of work that people put in is higher. So you can try to rearrange the humans, but you’re still one quarter of the—assuming that productivity is the same, which I think actually it might not be, I think China might have an advantage on productivity per person. We will do one quarter of the amount of things as China.

So we can’t win on the human front. And our birth rate’s been low for a long time. The US birth rate’s been below replacement since roughly 1971. So we’ve got a lot of people retiring or more people dying than—we’re close to more people domestically dying than being born. So we definitely can’t win on the human front, but we might have a shot at the robot front.”

Elon Musk explains the challenges of scaling Optimus production and how robotics could help America compete with China’s manufacturing dominance.

In Part 12, the conversation continues with Elon’s management and hiring philosophy.

Picture of Elon Musk as he jokingly questioned whether they were really going to talk for three full hours. Dwarkesh Patel teased him in return, saying he didn’t have much to talk about. Elon reacted with mock surprise.

Elon Musk with Dwarkesh Patel & John Collison – The Future of AI is in Space – Part 10: Optimus Robots, Digital Human Emulation & Hardware Challenges (Full Transcript)

Gail AlfarLeave a comment

In Part 10, John Collison and Dwarkesh Patel shift the conversation toward the practical future of AI products and humanoid robots. They ask Elon about digital human emulation, why he refers to Optimus as the “infinite money glitch,” and the biggest technical hurdles in scaling advanced humanoid robots.

Transcript:

Future of AI Products and Digital Human Emulation

John Collison asked for Elon’s predictions on where AI products are headed in 2026 and 2027. He noted that recent progress across labs has been rapid, with LLMs, reinforcement learning, and deep research modalities all advancing quickly. He observed that the real differences between labs now seem to be more about timing than fundamental capability gaps, and asked what users should expect next.

Elon Musk: “Well, I think I’d be surprised by the end of this year if digital human emulation has not been solved. I guess that’s what we mean by the sort of Macrohard project. Can you do anything that a human with access to a computer could do, like in the limit? That’s the best you can do before you have a physical Optimus. The best you can do is a digital Optimus. So you can move electrons and you can amplify the productivity of humans. But that’s the most you can do until you have physical robots that will superset everything — if you can fully emulate humans.”

Optimus as the Infinite Money Glitch

Elon Musk: “Once you have physical robots, then you essentially have unlimited capability. I call Optimus the infinite money glitch. Because you can use them to make more Optimuses. Humanoid robots will improve basically as three things that are growing exponentially multiplied by each other recursively: exponential increase in digital intelligence, exponential increase in chip capability, and exponential increase in electromechanical dexterity. The usefulness of the robot is roughly those three things multiplied by each other. But then the robot can start making the robot. So you have a recursive multiplicative exponential. This is supernova.”

Elon Musk: “Well, infinity is big. So no, not infinite, but let’s just say you could do many, many orders of magnitude of Earth’s kind of current economy, like a million. Just to get to… that’s why I think just to get to a millionth of harnessing length of the sun’s energy would be roughly, give or take an order of magnitude, 100,000 times bigger than Earth’s entire economy today. And you’re only at one millionth of the sun. Give or take an order of magnitude.”

xAI’s Winning Strategy

John Collison asked what xAI’s specific plan and strategy was to win in building advanced digital human emulators and remote worker replacements, noting that this is something every major lab is pursuing.

Elon Musk: “To do by the way, not just us. You expect me to tell you on a podcast? Yeah, spill all the beans, have another Guinness.”

Elon Musk: “Well, when you put it that way. I think the way that Tesla solved self-driving is the way to do it. So I’m pretty sure that’s the way.”

Elon Musk: “We’re going to try data and we’re going to try algorithms. And if those don’t work, I’m not sure what works. We’ve tried data, we’ve tried algorithms. We’ve run out of now we don’t know what to do. I’m pretty sure I know the path and it’s just a question of how quickly we go down that path because it’s pretty much the Tesla path. So I mean, have you tried self-driving lately?”

Elon Musk: “The car is like it just increasingly feels sentient, like it feels like a living creature and that’ll only get more so. And I’m actually thinking like we probably shouldn’t put too much intelligence into the car because it might get bored and start roaming the streets. I mean, imagine you’re stuck in a car and that’s all you could do. You don’t put Einstein in a car. It’s like, why am I stuck in a car? So there’s actually probably a limit to how much intelligence you put in a car to not have the intelligence be bored.”

Optimus Hardware and Training Challenges

Elon Musk: “The labs are at universities and they’re moving like a snail.”

Elon Musk: “You mean the revenue maximizing corporations? That’s right. The revenue maximizing corporations that call themselves…”

Elon Musk: “Well, there are really only three hard things for humanoid robots: real world intelligence, the hand and scale manufacturing. So I haven’t seen any even demo robots that have a great hand, like with all the degrees of freedom of a human hand. But Optimus will have that. Optimus does have that.”

Elon Musk: “We have to design custom actuators, basically custom designed motors, gears, power electronics, controls, sensors, everything had to be designed from physics first principles. There is no supply chain for this.”

Elon Musk: “From an electromechanical standpoint, the hand is more difficult than everything else combined. Human hand turns out to be quite something. But you also need the real world intelligence. So the intelligence that Tesla has developed for the car applies very well to the robot, which is primarily vision in, but the car takes more vision, but it actually also is listening for sirens, it’s taking in the inertial measurements, it’s GPS signals, a whole bunch of other data. Combining that with video, it’s primarily video and then outputting the control command. So your Tesla is taking in 1 1/2 gigabytes a second of video and outputting 2 kilobytes a second of control outputs with the video at 36 Hz and the control frequency at 18.”

Elon Musk: “You don’t care about the details of the leaves on the tree on the side of the road, but you care a lot about the road signs and the traffic lights and the pedestrians and even whether someone in another car is looking at you or not looking at you. Some of these details matter a lot, but it is essentially it’s got to turn that 1 1/2 gigabytes a second ultimately into 2 kilobytes a second of control outputs. So many stages of compression. And you got to get all those stages right and then correlate those to the correct control outputs. The robot has to do essentially the same thing. And you think about humans, this is what happens with humans. We really are photons in, controls out. So that is the vast majority of your life has been vision photons in and then motor controls out.”

Elon Musk: “Yes, that’s a good point.”

Elon Musk: “Now actually you’re highlighting an important limitation and difference between cars. We do have. We’ll soon have like 10 million cars on the road. And so that’s, it’s hard to duplicate that like massive training flywheel for the robot. What we’re going to need to do is build a lot of robots and put them in kind of like an Optimus academy so they can do self play in reality. So we’re actually building that out so we can have at least 10,000 Optimus robots, maybe 20 or 30,000 that can do that, are doing self play and testing different tasks. And then Tesla has quite a good reality generator, like a physics accurate reality generator that we made this for the cars. We’ll do the same thing for the robots and actually have done that for the robots. So you have a few tens of thousands of humanoid robots doing different tasks, and then you’ve got. You can do millions of simulated robots in the simulated world, and you use the tens of thousands of robots in the real world to close the simulation to reality gap, close the sim to real gap.”

Elon Musk: “Yeah, so you’d use GROK to orchestrate the behavior of the Optimus robots. So let’s say you wanted to build a factory, then Grok could organize the Optimus robots, give them, assign them tasks to build the factory, to produce whatever you want.”

Elon Musk explains the vision for digital human emulation and why he sees Optimus as a recursive breakthrough. He also outlines the three hardest technical challenges in building advanced humanoid robots.

In Part 11, the conversation moves into scaling manufacturing, competing with China, Elon’s management philosophy, the Starship steel pivot, and his final reflections.