The Tesla Bot 2025 Update is HERE!

Tesla is currently developing the third generation of their Optimus robot it's a product that Elon Musk has promised will be the most advanced humanoid robot in the world Tesla's competition in this market has been heating up as well there are robots everywhere right now and it's become more important than ever for the Tesla bot to deliver on elon's promise these are the features that will help keep Optimus one step ahead of the competition we have to start with the hands because the human hand has proven to be one of the most difficult things in the

world to replicate that goes for AI and Robotics as well but Tesla is getting close Elon Musk has promised that the Tesla bot gen 3 will be coming with a new hand design that offers 22° of Freedom this would be an upgrade over the 11 degrees of freedom in the current Tesla bot jet 2 in Practical terms this means that the Tesla bot's fingers will be getting a third knuckle if you look at your own hand your finger has three joints one where it connects to the hand itself one in the middle and one near

the fingertip if we look at the Tesla bot's current hand it has the joint where the finger meets the hand and the one near the tip but it's missing the middle Flex point that is a very important degree of Freedom we've seen a very interesting evolution of the Tesla bot hand design if we remember back to this image of the robot hands forming a heart from AI Day part two this one didn't really have fing fingers just a thumb and two claw-like appendages kind of reminds me of Danny DeVito's Penguin from Batman Returns anyway this

is following in Elon musk's philosophy of the best part is no part what you do is remove so many parts and components from a product until you're forced to start putting stuff back in in this case the starting point was the human hand an incredibly complex piece of Hardware that was meticulously crafted by millions of years of evolution Tesla bought hand V1 was rendering the human design down to its bare minimum that made it easy and cheap to produce but the whole point of the Tesla bot is that it will become a direct substitute for

human labor and we use our hands extensively in pretty much every line of work so the robot hands need to be on par then we get Tesla bot hand V2 they started putting stuff back in making it more humanlike so there are fingers now but Tesla is still trying to get away with simple ifying biology and it works well but there's still something missing you can tell by the way the Gen 2 bot holds stuff it doesn't ever seem to have a really solid grip I've tried this it's not physically possible but imagine if your

finger could only Bend in one spot instead of two it would be hard to grasp most of the tools that we use on a regular basis because they are designed for fully functioning human fingers so now we get to the Tesla bot gen 3 hand it will have that middle knuckle but it will also have an additional degree of Freedom that no other human robot has ever used so as I'm sitting here typing this script my fingers are constantly stretching out to reach the keys because I'm not a proper typist and I don't use my

pinky fingers on the keyboard but I can still do it because my three main fingers can stretch out wide to reach the outside keys and then Bunch together to reach the inside Keys that's something that the Tesla bot will be able to do as well these new degrees of freedom will allow optimist to spread his fingers wide and then Bunch them together just like a human hand Elon Musk has promised that Optimus gen3 will be able to play a piano so that should be pretty cool to see this would put Tesla's robotic abilities one big

step ahead of their strongest competition which at this point is coming from the relatively new robotics company figure who just released a video of their gen2 humanoid robot figure 2 has 16 Dee of Freedom hands meaning it does have the third knuckle so we can see what that looks like on a humanoid robot and it gives figure 2 the ability to make a tight fist just like a person though we can also see that figure 2 does not have the ability to spread its fingers the reason that figure are able to be competitive with Tesla

after only 2 years of existence basically comes down to their support network figure is backed by Microsoft Nvidia and open AI so all that they really need to focus on is the robotics aspect and their Partners can take care of the rest while we're looking at the figure robot it's pretty easy to spot some major design differences between the two figure has a big thick hand and fingers while Optimus has a much more human-like Anatomy the reason is that Tesla uses a very humanlike control system for their hand while figure has put a bunch of

electric motors or actuators inside the hands and fingers of the robot Tesla opted to use metal tendons that run through the hand and into the fingers again same deal in your own hand it's not full of muscles if you clench a fist and release it you'll feel muscles flexing way back in your forearm that's where the hand really gets its power from and the same happens in the Tesla bot we also notice a big difference in the wrist of figure 2 compared to the wrist of Optimus again figure is chunky while Tesla is Sleek and

humanlike this comes down to a preference in actuators figure obviously prefers rotational actuators for its robot joints which are basically just electric motors instead of spinning around they just rotate small amounts to move the joints while Tesla prefers linear actuators which are also electric motors but they function more like Pistons they extend and contract to move a metal rod in and out that pushes and pulls on the robot's joints which yet again more closely mimics the human anatomy every move you make is a balance of muscles Contracting and relaxing aside from their very flexible hand

one of the biggest Flexes in the new figure 2 video is the section where the robots are performing tasks on an assembly line This is the body shop inside a BMW car factory and it's made to look like the robots are performing useful tasks any human worker who moved this slow would be fired of course but they do seem to be able to do the job which is neat we've seen pretty much the same from Tesla over the summer Elon Musk said that there are two Optimus robots working at a Tesla Factory in Fremont we've

now seen a couple of video clips where the Bots are taking 4680 battery cells from a production line and placing them into shipping containers again they are moving painfully slow but they can do the job Elon keeps promising that by the end of the year there will be Bots working in the factory doing more tasks so hopefully he's not too far off with that prediction here is another big feature released that is going to be critical for the Tesla bot gen 3 it needs to have a voice and that's not just because figures robot already

has a voice and Tesla needs to compete it's because there is generally no point to having a humanoid robot that is designed for work unless it can communicate through speech the bot needs to understand what you're asking it to do at the very least but it would also be great if the robot talks back so that it can confirm that it understands or ask a question or explain what it's doing and why the point is we definitely don't want these silent automatons is just wandering around doing stuff with no way to know what it's up

to Elon Musk has said that the Tesla bot will have a customizable voice and personality it will get to know its owner and understand their preferences to the point where you won't even need to ask the robot to do something it will just know what you want figure has a voice that's powered by open AI it's basically like if you ran chat GPT on a human shaped computer and added a voice function nothing particularly groundbreaking in this day and age but we know that open AI is an industry leader when it comes to AI language

models so they will be tough to compete against luckily for Tesla open AI does have a strong new competitor and it just happens to also be owned by Elon Musk X ai's latest grock 2 language model just came out in August and it's already competing very strongly with open AI GPT 4 now Gro is still lagging behind a little bit on the industry Benchmark testing but for the average user the difference is pretty much negligible so this gives the Tesla bot access to a language model that would be competitive with what figure is offering which

means that we should be hearing Optimus speak sometime very soon or are we hearing grock speak through Optimus I don't know what I have been trying to figure out is how to reach a point where interaction with the robot is more conversational the biggest problem that stood out with the figure One open AI chat video is that the bot was always very slow to respond and that's with the advantage of industry-leading AI models and Computing Hardware straight from Nvidia so theoretically this is as fast as a talking robot can possibly go and that's a little

disappointing from what I can gather the problem comes down to energy it's totally possible to run the AI models natively on a computer that's integrated into the robot but the processing power needed to run a complex AI is very energy intensive you need hundreds of watts of power just going to the AI computer so now we need to make a decision because the robot is battery powered we have a finite amount of energy to work with do we want a really capable robot or a really powerful AI computer we don't have enough energy on board

to support both at once not yet at least so for now we'll just have to settle with the robot sending queries off through Wi-Fi to a dedicated AI server that will run the model and then broadcast the answer back to the robot I don't know if anyone else was curious about how that worked but I thought it was cool