Konstantinos Laskaris, Tesla Lead Director of Optimus, at the ETH Robotics Club INSPIRE Talk in Switzerland. Konstantinos presented Optimus 2.5 and the work behind it and its predecessors. Here are some highlights from the talk.
The sim-to-real gap is propaganda.
“It’s not a gap if you haven’t tried to model your robot properly.”
Hardware matters more than most people think. If you can’t replicate human motion on hardware, no amount of real-world data will save you.
Tendon-driven hands are the way. Anything with motors physically cannot reproduce human muscle force density.
Not a preference: a physics constraint.
On physics engines: don’t constrain yourself to what exists.
His challenge to the community: do you even understand how physics works? Go build your own simulation. Reproduce the fidelity YOU need.
Optimus V3 is coming soon. It won’t be sold to the public. It won’t go to factories.
First customer? Tesla itself.
They’re building a Bot Academy. A secure environment where robots learn tasks from scratch.
Example: hold and operate a drill.
Optimus V3 is coming soon.
It won’t be sold to the public. It won’t go to factories.
First customer? Tesla itself.
They’re building a “Bot Academy”: a secure environment where robots learn tasks from scratch.
Example: hold and operate a drill.
— odesha (@oskrt_dvs) April 3, 2026
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“It won’t be sold to the public. It won’t go to factories.”
The first part seems obvious and what they’ve said for a long time. The second is just confusing. What’s the point in mass producing them if they don’t use them throughout the Musk enterprises and with suppliers? They don’t need tens of thousands of them for a bot academy. Maybe this part is just about the first few months of slow production.
By “factories” he was talking about selling them commercially, not themselves. Musk will using them in his factories, doing real work, replacing real people, this year.
I didn’t know they wont even sell V3. I knew the 1st year or so would go to Tesla themselves, and perhaps some to other Musk ventures. But I thought at some point next year, anyone could buy one. I guess customers will have to wait for V4, which will have a AI5 chip, and I’d bet begin to be built late next year.
Certainly feels like they continue to fall behind, But I think that’s because Elon revealed WAY too much during his retarded AI day, and everyone from China was drooling with pen & paper in hand. So now he keeps it closer to the chest.
But he just needs to show things off better, focus on capabilities, not hardware or software.
“Tendon-driven hands are the way. Anything with motors physically cannot reproduce human muscle force density.
Not a preference: a physics constraint.”
Yes, some sort of variable torsion device that will allow the delicate grasping of a raw egg without breakage and yet also will allow heavy work such as tightening up bolts while holding heavy axle hubs, etc….. it gets around the difficulty of trying to match the dexterity of 6 million years of hominin/hominid evolution by using a different approach.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/overview-of-hominin-evolution-89010983
AI Robotics will advance as more practical tests are performed in “real world” situations.
I can see this technology making great strides into automobile and “white goods” manufacturing, possibly into ship welding/construction as well.