American electric vehicle and clean energy company, Tesla Inc has revealed its plans to build a Humanoid robot prototype by next year.
As reported by CNBC, the announcement came as a part of the company’s AI Day, a machine-learning recruitment program preceded by a series of tech talks in California. The Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) humanoid robot is a complement to the company’s advanced battery and sensor designs.
“We’re also good at sensors and batteries and we’ll probably have a prototype next year that looks like this,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, commenting on an acted gyration from an artist on stage, with costume mimicking the proposed Tesla’s robot. He remarked that the actor was not a real robot, but “the Tesla Bot will be real.”
The Tesla robot is designed to take over some of the redundant tasks that humans do. It’s announcement came as a means to excite the company’s backers, who are now looking forward to more futuristic products from the company. According to the Tesla boss, should the robot be able to take over the repetitive and dangerous tasks humans do, the global economy can be greatly transformed through reduced labor costs.
The robot is codenamed “Optimus” and its design is based on the sensors and chips that are manufactured by Tesla and implanted in its self-driving cars. The robot will be five foot eight inches tall and designed with a screen at the front of its head, to relay useful information. Additionally, the robot will weigh 125 pounds, will have the capability to carry 45 pounds, lift 150 pounds, and run at 5 miles per hour.
In order to taper down expectations, Musk cautions that the robot may not work at first, however, its capabilities will involve being able to go get groceries and run petty errands.
Besides TSLA Humanoid Robot, the Firm Unveils Dojo D1
Tesla’s ingenuity in its latest product lines transcends just the proposed humanoid robots. The Palo Alto-based firm has also unveiled a new chip dubbed Dojo D1 targeted at training advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) models.
As revealed by Ganesh Venkataramanan, Senior Director of Autopilot Hardware, the D1 Chip, a part of the company’s Dojo Supercomputer system uses a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, with 362 teraflops of processing power. 25 of these chips will be placed together to form a ‘training tile’ and a total of 120 of these tiles are merged together across different server systems to form an exaflop of power.
The D1 Chips will be the most advanced and fastest AI-training computer and is billed to find uses in training models capable of recognizing a variety of items including video feeds collected by cameras inside Tesla vehicles. The chips are set to be operational by next year, according to CEO Elon Musk.
Despite these recent announcements, Tesla stock closed Thursday’s trading session at a 2.25% loss to $673.47 per share.
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