Name: Why Being First Matters for Tesla Optimus (Ep. 759)
Uploaded: 2024-06-21T01:52:31.000Z
Duration: 12 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Yesterday I was at the Tesla shareholder meeting and the energy was great.

Past perfect

Elon had announced the day prior that the two most important resolutions had been approved by shareholders.

So I won't go into that today but in this video I want to focus on two specific things.

First I want to talk about the unique position of Tesla to make the best humanoid robot and number two why being first matters with humanoid robots.

All right in order for a company to make a successful humanoid robot I think it comes down to two main factors.

The first is the humanoid robot needs to be capable of doing many useful things that humans are able to do.

If a robot is not able to do that then it lacks value and has no compelling features to really offer people.

The second thing is the humanoid robot needs to be affordable.

It makes no sense for a humanoid robot to cost millions of dollars because not many people can afford it.

It's much easier to hire humans at that price.

So in order to get to that point where a humanoid robot can be affordable and capable it takes a complete reinventing of every part and angle of a humanoid robot.

You see typical robots that are made in the past haven't been good enough.

They haven't been able to do many of the things that humans are able to do on a regular daily basis.

So in order to make a truly capable humanoid robot Tesla needs to reinvent the humanoid robot hardware, the body.

They need to make the hardware with exceptionally better motors, gearboxes, sensors, power electronics, the whole robotic hardware system.

The hardware itself needs to be capable of doing many of the things that humans are able to physically do like folding clothes, picking up tools.

What Tesla has found is that there's no out-of-the-box solution or parts available for that type or standard of humanoid robot.

So Tesla has had to go to the drawing board and get their best electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and other engineers involved in creating from scratch new motors, new gearboxes, sensors, power electronics, everything in the robot.

They've had to design from scratch every part of this new humanoid optimist robot.

Further, Tesla has a huge lead with the AI computer.

They've had their FSD computer in their cars since 2017 or so with hardware 2, then hardware 3, now hardware 4.

Soon in a couple years it'll be hardware or AI5.

That inference computer in Tesla's cars is super powerful yet it's super efficient.

It's exactly what's but also for a humanoid robot.

In other words, Tesla has a multi-year lead with this super important part of the humanoid robot which is the hardware brains.

So you've got the hardware body that is super difficult and Tesla has all of the pieces already in place to make, develop, and reinvent those parts to bring these parts together for the humanoid robot body.

And then you've got AI hardware brain which is the AI inference computer and Tesla has a multi-year lead on that.

And then you've got the AI brain itself or the software and that's the AI model which involves a robot knowing how to navigate to see things, learn things, and do things.

And Tesla has a multi-year lead on this as well through their full self-driving training.

Now Tesla is applying a lot of that real-world AI experience into a humanoid robot.

Tesla also has a lot of experience with manufacturing.

They're one of the best manufacturers in the world.

They know how to design for manufacturing and how to manufacture at high volume.

You've got all these pieces that Tesla has uniquely and I think it's this unique combination that no other company in the world has right now.

On top of that, you've got a visionary leader who gets it, who understands the potential of a humanoid robot.

He understands what it takes to make the best humanoid robot out and he has a uniquely powerful skill to focus and push his team forward toward aggressive goals.

When you put all of this together, you see that Tesla is in a unique position to make the best humanoid robot out there.

Alright, so the second point I want to dive into is why being first matters with humanoid robots.

So the first reason I think is if you're first, you'll get more data.

In other words, you'll have more robots out there and you're able to improve your AI models more into your AI models and make them better.

Once you have millions of humanoid robots out there in people's homes and workplaces and you have all this data being collected, that can significantly improve how fast your AI models are becoming more capable.

This is an advantage if you're first to the market.

Second, you're able to bring down the price of your product through economies of scale.

If you're able to sell more of the product, the price per item will go down because you're able to utilize economies of scale.

As a result, if the price is cheaper, you're going to be able to sell more of them because demand will be higher.

And then you're going to be able to cross over into profitability more quickly.

This also causes big problems for every other company in the humanoid robot market because they're going to need a lot of volume in order to do the same thing.

Now you've already entered and taken your stake in the market.

In other words, the market isn't empty anymore.

And if you're dominating that market, other companies are going to either have to make a better humanoid robot than you, which is difficult because you have economies of scale already from being first and your humanoid robot is cheaper.

If they can't do that, then they're going to have to subsidize their introduction of the robot and lose a lot of money for a long time until they can get those economies of scale.

Even that is difficult because how do you make a robot better than yours if you have the data from millions of robots on the field making your AI models better?

The other option is companies can try to focus on a more narrow use case of a robot rather than being a generalized humanoid robot.

They can have maybe some specialized functionality, but then that's a smaller market.

I mean it could lead to profitability because maybe that narrow use robot can do certain things better and maybe it's cheaper than a generalized humanoid robot.

However, it's a smaller market and it might be slower to reach economies of scale in a slower market.

A generalized humanoid robot like Optimus can learn quite fast, so it could actually make these other narrow use cases perhaps irrelevant over time as it becomes more capable.

All right, a third thing about being first to humanoid robots is that you have mind share and marketing.

If you're first to the market and you're first to really getting millions of humanoid robots out there, everyone will associate humanoid robots basically with your company, with your product.

I think when you put all of these things together, they matter.

For example, getting more data to make your AI models better, to make your product better, getting your price down, getting to economies of scale, basically taking over the market before others get in.

Then other companies, they basically have to beat your product in capability and price, but that's extremely, extremely difficult for a startup to do in a field where there's a big first mover advantage.

The first mover product is getting better quickly and the price is coming down as well.

Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to continue that pace of innovation because that pace of innovation matters the most ultimately.

It doesn't matter if you're first to market, but you're slow with innovation after that.

The others will catch up and will outpace you, but if you're first to innovation, quickly iterating, then you're going to be a formidable company that's extremely difficult to beat.

All in all, I think this is part of what I think Elon Musk means by opening up a new book at Tesla.

The first book was Electric Vehicles and getting into Tesla Energy and Sustainable Energy.

This next book, however, I think is about Robotaxi and Optimus.

It's about these applications of people's lives and the world.

I think at the center of a lot of this is Tesla shareholders reaffirming their commitment and their approval of Elon Musk as the leader of Tesla.

I think the key thing that Elon brings to Tesla is that he is an accelerant of innovation.

Even he used that phrase at the shareholder meeting.

What that means is that when there's something that needs to improve, that needs to be developed or invented, or a new product has to come to life, Elon knows exactly how to get there.

He knows how to recruit the right talent.

He knows how to focus on the right things.

He knows how to push his teams forward to the right goals.

He understands and gets how innovation works.

This really matters because leadership is key in order to make all of this come together.

It's interesting and exciting because the humanoid robot is probably the biggest market out there.

The humanoid robot is probably the most substantial product, at least I could think of right now.

If things go well, I mean obviously there are risks involved, but if things go well, then Tesla I think has definitely a bright future with Robotaxi and Optimus humanoid robot.

All right, hope that's been helpful and we'll see you guys in my next video.

I'll go ahead and end with the final three minutes or so of the shareholder meeting.

A great clip by Elon Musk diving into some of these points that I share in this video regarding Tesla's position to develop this humanoid robot and what it means in terms of potential.

Tesla is going to be by far the leader in that.

You're seeing a lot of robot startups, but I think it's actually very challenging to do Optimus as a robot startup because what we found to make Optimus work, we've had to design from first principles, from scratch, every part of electronics, the communication system, everything had to be done from scratch.

We found that there's basically nothing, there's no supply chain.

So even though there are many electric motors made in the world, there's no supply chain for the types of motors and sensors and gearboxes that are needed for a humanoid robot.

Because it requires so much ground-up design, designing every motor, gearbox, sensor, power electronics from scratch, it's very hard for a startup to, if not impossible, for a startup to replicate that.

But at Tesla, we have the world's best electrical engineering.

I think we've got the world's best mechanical engineering for gearboxes and for electric motors, power electronics.

And then you also have to have the brain.

You need a power-efficient inference computer, which we've got for the car, and we'll be using an Optimus.

You need to be the best in real world AI, and Tesla's the best in real world AI.

So you need all of these, you need a very strong hand of cards in order to make a compelling robot.

And then you also need to be very good at scale manufacturing.

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Why Being First Matters for Tesla Optimus (Ep. 759)

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