1M units/year for Gen 3 Optimus
Tesla plans to transition to a Gen 4 design before attempting to scale production to 10 million units per year.
Snapshot · Dwarkesh Podcast
Elon Musk — "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space”
Explore episode
Feb 5, 2026
Where this was said
Optimus and humanoid manufacturing
At 1:25:50 · chapter starts 1:17:21
Optimus and the Challenge of the Human Hand
Developing a hand with full human dexterity is more challenging than all other physical engineering elements of the Optimus robot combined. Because no off-the-shelf catalog parts can deliver the necessary torque, Tesla had to build every actuator and sensor from physics first principles.
Training Humanoids Through Reality Generators and Self-Play
Unlike Tesla's millions of cars gathering real-world driving data, robots cannot easily collect ambient training datasets. Tesla is building dedicated schools where tens of thousands of physical robots engage in self-play, generating data to constantly refine and close the gap on virtual simulations.
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