If you've ever wished you could outsource tasks like laundry, dishes, or assembling an IKEA bookshelf — well, Elon Musk believes your days of domestic despair are numbered. According to him, we're walking straight into the era of personal humanoid robots… and we're all going to want one.
In a wide-ranging interview at Tesla HQ with CNBC's journalist David Faber in May, Musk laid out an extraordinarily bullish vision for Optimus, declaring that humanoid robots will eventually become the most valuable product in history.
"I think humanoid robots will be the biggest product ever," Musk said. "The demand will be insatiable."
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When Faber noted that Musk has previously said "everyone's going to want one," Musk doubled down: "It's like, basically, who wouldn't want their own personal C-3PO? R2-D2?…Everyone."
Musk reiterated his target of producing roughly a million Optimus robots per year by 2030 — a goal he still considers "a reasonable target" — as the first major step toward what he calls "sustainable abundance."
The bigger question is how quickly the robots can become genuinely useful. Faber pressed Musk on the training challenge, pointing out how long it has taken to make Tesla's cars drive autonomously.
"A lot," Musk admitted when asked how much training the robots will need. "It's going to take a lot of compute resources and it'll take time."
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But Musk believes there are pivotal thresholds ahead that will dramatically accelerate progress. The most important, he said, is when Optimus can learn new tasks simply by watching video.
"I think there's certain threshold breakthroughs that we think we can achieve where if Optimus can watch videos — YouTube videos or how-to videos or whatever — and based on that video, just like a human can learn how to do that thing, then you really have task extensibility that is dramatic because then it can learn anything very quickly," Musk explained. "So I think we'll get there."
Right now, Tesla is still in the early stages: engineers wear motion-capture suits to teach Optimus primitive actions like picking up objects or opening doors. But Musk envisions a far more powerful phase — one that mirrors childhood learning.
"Where I think it gets very interesting and very much like humans is that you want the robot to self-play," he said. "So you say, how does a child learn? Well, a child has toys. A child plays with the toys, plays with the blocks… By doing it over and over again and this — the self-play — once you have a lot of robots, you can do this self-play, which is that you just put the robot in a room with toys and have the robot play with toys."
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Using the classic shape-sorter toy as an example, Musk continued: "You're the goal of the robot is to… put the circle in the circle hole, the square in the square hole, triangle in the triangle hole and keep doing it until it works. And the reward function is succeeding."
Faber asked whether any fundamental AI breakthroughs are still required.
"There are some advances needed," Musk replied, "but I don't think these are insurmountable."
With Tesla already demonstrating Optimus folding shirts, sorting objects, and walking more naturally than any competing humanoid, Musk's timeline — ambitious as always — suddenly feels a little less crazy. If he's right, the age of the personal robot isn't science fiction anymore.
It's just a matter of training.
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