Tesla boss Elon Musk wants to revolutionize work in factories with his humanoid robot Optimus. But the former development manager of the project contradicts. Optimus is completely unsuitable for industrial work. The design is “hyper-subtimal”.
Optimus is not optimal
In his humanoid robot Optimus, Elon Musk sees one of the most important future projects from Tesla and expects the company to make the company 43 times more valuable through its work in the factories of the carmaker. But how many of the billionaire projects are always delayed. Most recently, Tesla showed impressive progress in the robot in a video on X.
Musk predicts that Optimus will soon be in a thousand -subject execution in Tesla’s works and will revolutionize the work there. But now an important former employee with strong doubts speaks. Chris Walti, the former development manager of the Optimus project, considers the human-like form of the robot to be completely unsuitable. How Business Insider reports, argues Walti: “It is not a useful form factor. Most of the work that needs to be done in industry are highly repetitive tasks in which speed is crucial.”
The expert, who set up the development team for Optimus, further explains that people “have developed to escape wolves and bears. We were not designed to perform the same tasks again and again. So why should you have a hyper-subtimal system that is really not designed for repetitive tasks?”
Another headwind for musk
Walti is already the second (ex) Tesla employee who contradicts Musk’s optimistic forecasts within a short time. Ashok Elluswamy, who is responsible for artificial intelligence and self -driving systems at Tesla, had only recently granted that Tesla was behind the competition when it comes to Full Self Driving. Musk himself had claimed years ago that Tesla cars were completely autonomously driving right before their broad market launch.
Competition continues
As for Optimus, Walti is not the first to express doubt. Other experts also point out that specialized industrial robots in repetitive tasks are significantly more efficient than humanoid models. The human -like form hardly offers any advantages in factory environments, but causes considerable technical challenges. Tesla was also not the first company that worked on a humanoid robot, and according to available knowledge, you are not the most advanced.
Companies like Boston Dynamics have been working on the development of two -legged robots for decades and have impressive successes. Tesla is also currently fighting with problems with the production of Optimus. This was affected by Chinese export restrictions on rare earths. Nevertheless, Tesla plans to build 10,000 optimus robots this year.
