Elon Musk on Tesla's Optimus: The billion-robot army could be 'largest source for AI data'

Elon Musk believes that Optimus, Tesla's humanoid robot, will eventually become the largest source of real-world data for AI training, surpassing even the vast datasets generated by Tesla's fleet of vehicles. In his conversation with Lex Fridman, Musk explained how Optimus's ability to interact with the physical world at scale will generate an unprecedented amount of valuable data.

"Optimus is going to be the biggest source of data because it’s, because reality scales. Reality scales to the scale of reality," Musk asserted. "It’s actually humbling to see how little data humans have actually been able to accumulate, um, really say how many trillions of usable tokens have humans generated? Where, on a non-duplicate, like discounting spam and repetitive stuff, it’s not a huge number. You run out pretty quickly."

He envisions a future with billions of Optimus robots performing a wide range of tasks, from simple chores to complex industrial operations, all the while gathering data about the real world. This data, according to Musk, will be crucial for training AI systems to understand and navigate the complexities of the physical environment.

"Optimus can go, Tesla cars can, or unfortunately have to stay on the road, uh, Optimus robot can go anywhere," Musk pointed out. "There’s more reality off the road than on. I mean, taught from the standpoint, can [it] like pick up the cup and see did it pick up the cup in the right way? Did it, you know, say, pour water in the cup, you know? Did the water go in the cup or not go in the cup? Did it spill water or not? Yeah, um, simple stuff like that. I mean, but it can do that at that scale times a billion, you know? So, generate useful data from reality, sort of cause and effect stuff."