The Tesla Optimus V3 will ignite the Humanoid bot revolution and has solved the hands problem. There are three major problems really good hands, really good AI mind that understands the real world and will be able to made at scale in the millions. There are also unmentioned issues of durability and being able to last for years of usage.
Musk says the Tesla Optimus Version 3 is sublime and has a breakthrough with human-level manual dexterity (27-28 degrees of freedom per hand), AI for real-world navigation, and high-volume production. Challenges include no existing supply chain—Tesla must vertically integrate actuators (26 per arm). They have custom motors, gearboxes/electronics that were designed from first principles. Tesla vehicle scaling but was a harder than just making a few working units. Teslabot is harder than Model X and cybertruck but easier than SpaceX Starship.
The design is finalizing now (2025). They are targeting high-volume production of million bots per year or more by ~2030. They will cost ~$20K-$25K with the AI5 and later AI6 chips and memory for about ~$5K-6K. They will sell for about $40000. First-wave pricing demand-driven which means for $80000 to 150000. They will have ranch-ready bots selling to regular people starting in 2026-2027.
The AI5 is making huge progress and will be 40 times better than AI4 in some metrics. AI5 has 40x improvement over AI4 for softmax. It has 8x raw compute, 9x memory, 5x bandwidth and has native softmax/mixed precision. It is co-designed with software.
AI5 will be used for robotaxi and teslabot. Both will provide distributed AI inference as a major cloud computing like major revenue line that could be more profitable than their actual main mobility or labor functions. AI5 will further improve robotaxi as well as being critical for Optimus as has been described. Tesla FSD for robotaxi safety will have 2-10x human level safety by end-2025 and this 10x parameters and still just use AI4. AI5 will enable Tesla FSD to get even better to perhaps 100X human level of safety.
The bot hands will be versatile and able to thread needles, playing violin or assembling cars. Most human hand muscles are in the forearm. The tendons are puppet system for the hand. Just making a robot hand like the human hands is a materials/engineering nightmare. Tesla solved this with physics-based redesign and enabling generalized tasks in human-designed environments.
Tesla is solving the last mile of robotics—generalization over specialization. It will be seamless to put it into the existing human infrastructure with infinite scability. The bots adapt to us instead of us making massive changes to our world for bots. Hardware edges out software as current bottleneck, but LLMs provide free interaction. The voice commands are like Grok’s Annie and other persona that are already being used.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Why is there a random block about FSD in the middle of an article about robots?
AI5 will be used for robotaxi and teslabot. Both will provide distributed AI inference as a major cloud computing like major revenue line that could be more profitable than their actual main mobility or labor functions
e-waste. Landfill. Gimmick.
Useful robot: spider form that lasers/picks weeds and picks beetles off crops. Useful robots cut grass, clean floors, warehouse ops (e.g. forklift) – don’t need it to be humanoid – that’s gimmick.
There was a short story years ago, about a ‘robot psychiatrist’ who was trying to figure out the cause of an epidemic of robots vandalizing themselves.
It actually came down to them wanting to be rid of humanoid features that in no way contributed to their work.
But, the reason the Optimus is designed to have a human form is because it’s supposed to be a drop in replacement for a human in existing factories. And trains from video of humans performing tasks.
Both would be a lot harder if the form weren’t human.
27-28 degrees of freedom per hand actually seems a bit high.
The wrist contributes 3 degrees of freedom.
The thumb and each of the fingers has 4 degrees of freedom.
Then there’s 1 degree of freedom to “cup” your palm.
And in a human hand, some of these degrees of freedom aren’t even entirely independent.
That’s only 24; Where are the other 3-4?
The human shoulder is a very complex joint, it has 5 degrees of freedom.
The elbow 1 degree.
I could believe the Optimus has 26 motors per arm including the shoulder;
3 degrees for minimal shoulder functionality, pan, tilt, and rotate. No need for shrugging.
1 for the elbow
3 for the wrist.
That would leave 19 for the fingers and thumb, and assuming you used the full 4 for the thumb, you’d have enough left for the fingers to do basically everything humans do. The human hand actually has more degrees of freedom than people use.
“Just making a robot hand like the human hands is a materials/engineering nightmare.”
No kidding. As a robotics hobbyist, I’ve tried to design one, and it is pretty nightmarish. Honestly, robots should just omit the pinky. And building one that is actually maintainable would be even harder.
It’s interesting that animators and artists also want to omit the pinky. A LOT of animated characters only have four digits: the simpsons, mickey, every single looney toons character, everything disney that isn’t a princess, spongebob, king of the hill etc
You can even see it in the size, relative to the other fingers: The pinky is vestigial, like the little toe. It’s not carrying its weight, and is evolving away.