Image courtesy of Tesla
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, tested the Optimus humanoid robot prototype and the location of Tesla’s new factory during yesterday’s annual shareholder meeting.
Let’s look at the somewhat uninteresting news from the annual shareholder meeting before getting too excited.
At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, shareholders voted the majority of board recommendations, including authorising a stock split and re-electing directors, while rejecting proposals that focused on environment & governance.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, stated that the business would keep constructing factories in order to reach a production pace of 2 million vehicles yearly by the end of 2022.
Musk hinted at a new Tesla location “later this year” during the meeting, saying, “We got a lot of Canada.” I have half Canadian. Perhaps I should?”
Tesla has factories in California and Shanghai, and it is building 2 more in Austin, Texas, & Berlin, Germany. Musk predicted that he would eventually have 10-12 gigafactories.
Optimus might be revealed in September
Musk revealed an image of the Optimus prototype while teasing AI Day #2, which was supposed to be held on August 19th but was postponed by Musk to September 3rd.
The image appears to show the actual Tesla Optimus prototype’s robotic hands making a heart sign.
He previously explained why AI Day #2 was being postponed: the company may be working on the Optimus prototype until then.
Musk announced in January that the development of Optimus in 2022 will take precedence over other products. Optimus, or Optimus Subprime, a bipedal, humanoid robot that Musk teased during Tesla’s AI Day in August 2021, is Musk’s vision of a bot that can do all the boring, repetitive tasks that humans prefer not to do.
He hopes to begin production of the first version of Optimus in 2023. “It will upend our understanding of what the economy is,” Musk said in a video of the event. “It will be capable of do anything that humans do not want to do. It will get the job done. It is going to bring age of abundance. It may be difficult to imagine, but as you watch Optimus develop, and we will ensure that it is safe (no Terminator stuff), it will transform the world to an even greater extent than the car.”
We are excited to learn that Optimus will be revealed in two months, and we will see if the dark path from the Terminator franchise becomes a reality or if we are going to have robots that acts like house elves.
