Tesla Optimus Robot

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About

The Tesla Optimus Robot is a general-purpose robot created by Tesla and showcased alongside the Tesla Robovan at the "We, Robot" event at the L.A. Warner Bros. Studios on October 10th, 2024. The name "Optimus" is a reference to the Transformers character Optimus Prime. A model commonly referred to as the Tesla Bot was previously unveiled in August 2021, later becoming the Optimus. Tesla's CEO Elon Musk was present at the event and became the subject of numerous memes as the product garnered attention around the internet. Videos of the Optimus bots making drinks and speaking with attendees at the festival began making the rounds online soon after the event.

History

The first semi-functional prototypes of Optimus were unveiled on October 1st, 2022, at Tesla's second AI Day.^[1] On September 24th, 2023, Tesla posted a video to its official YouTube^[2] channel showing an Optimus model stretching and doing yoga, receiving over 2.2 million views and 56,000 likes in a year.

Unveiling At 2024 "We, Robot" Event

The Optimus model was featured in Tesla's "We, Robot" event in mid-October 2024, causing a surge in media coverage and discourse online about the product. At the event, Elon Musk announced that Optimus would be available for purchase at around $30,000 and that the robot could be used to complete a wide range of tasks at home and outside.^[3]

Various X users posted initial looks and reactions to Optimus on October 10th, 2024, including X^[4] user @Cancelcloco, who wrote, "What could possibly go wrong…," gathering over 11,000 likes in two days.

On October 11th, 2024, Redditor^[5] /u/Justin_Godfrey posted a compilation of Optimus clips to the subreddit /r/Damnthatsinteresting, gathering over 21,000 upvotes in a day.

Online Presence

Videos of Optimus pouring event-goers drinks began making the rounds on social media soon after the "We, Robot" event, with X^[6] user @ChrisJBakke gathering over 100,000 likes on an October 11th, 2024, post captioned, "Optimus just poured a drink and didn’t ask for a 25% tip on an iPad. Just put $10M more into Tesla stock."

Also on October 11th, tech YouTuber^[7] Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) posted a video of an Optimus robot copying his motions, writing, "Playing charades with the Tesla Optimus robot last night. This is either the single greatest robotics and LLM demo the world has ever seen, or it's MOSTLY remote operated by a human. No in between." The post gathered over 44,000 likes in a day.

Suspicions that Tesla's Optimus was largely manually operated were echoed by other internet users and covered by various media outlets in mid-October 2024, including X^[8] user @BirdRespecter, who posted an excerpt from a Gizmodo^[9] article about the event implying that the robots were not autonomously functioning.