Name: Elon Musk Reveals Major New Tesla Bot Upgrade!
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T22:49:46.000Z
Duration: 11 min 32 s
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On today's episode, Optimus dances without strings, the Boring Company moves in on Amtrak's biggest mess, Grok goes rogue, and FSD takes on Paris and Melbourne.

Tesla dropped two new videos of its Optimus robot dancing this week.

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Optimus performs a dance that sort of resembles a move known as the Roger Rabbit in this 6 second silent video, while the robot itself remains tethered to a safety cable.

The presence of the cable would make it appear like this is still a work in progress.

However, Milan Kovac, Tesla's robotics lead, posted a clarification saying the cable wasn't supporting the robot, it was only there to catch the robot if it were to fall.

He called it an early result that would improve quickly.

The second video, released just one day later, shows that Optimus has dance moves that are almost ready for TikTok, and this time, no cable.

The 42 second video opens with a simple piano melody as Optimus moves through a series of controlled, deliberate poses.

Then the music shifts and the robot launches into a fast-paced routine with moves drawn from across pop culture, including The Running Man, Fortnite, and even some viral classics.

Optimus showed off the kind of moves you might see at a music festival or a nightclub.

A side-by-side comparison from ex-user Sawyer Merritt shows just how closely the robot tracks its human counterpart.

It's not just balanced, it's dancing on time, on its own.

Like a certain wooden puppet, Musk's robotic marionette has shed its strings one step closer to being real.

Kovac confirmed that the entire dance routine wasn't taught through physical trial and error, it was learned entirely in a virtual environment using reinforced learning.

That means the figured out how to move by trying, failing, and improving inside a computer simulation rather than on the factory floor, or dance floor in this particular case.

To make that simulation realistic enough for the behavior to work in real life, the team upgraded their physics engine, the part of the software that controls how the robot reacts to forces like gravity, friction, and balance.

They also used a technique called domain randomization where they deliberately added noise and unpredictability into the virtual environment, like uneven floors or jittery motors, to make sure the robot could handle the messiness of the real world.

The result is what's called zero-shot transfer.

The robot went from learning entirely in simulation to performing the task in the real world without any additional tuning or practice.

It didn't have to be taught the moves again in real life, it just worked.

He said the upgrades won't just help with choreography but would carry over to other tasks that require mobility or sophisticated coordination.

According to Elon, this isn't just a one-off stunt.

Musk wrote on X, it does this every day in our Palo Alto lab, and multiple Optimus robots walk around the office 24-7 with no one watching over them, charging themselves as needed.

Elon even promised to bring a full Optimus dance troupe on stage at an upcoming shareholder meeting.

The dance might grab headlines, but the real story is what Tesla says it's building behind the scenes.

During a recent session with Wall Street analysts, the company said it can currently produce 12 Optimus robots at a time, having demonstrated that level of output in their Palo Alto lab.

The first full production line is targeting 1,000 units per month at its factory in Fremont, California.

A second-gen line aims for 10,000, and a third-gen line is being designed to scale the output tenfold.

Musk quickly corrected one point, saying they haven't hit the 1K per month pace just yet, the production line is still many months away.

Tesla wants to build thousands of Optimus robots by the end of the year, and for all of Elon's big AI talk, he's been weirdly consistent about one thing from the very start.

When Optimus was first introduced at Tesla's AI Day in 2021, there was just a person in a silver bodysuit pretending to be one, dancing awkwardly.

At the time, it was easy to laugh off, and many did, but in hindsight, that performance wasn't just theater, it was foreshadowing.

The next year, the robot suit was retired for a real robot, but no dancing this time.

By last fall, Tesla had brought the idea full circle at its own WeRobot event.

Optimus, the real robot this time, was dancing again, but it did a lot more.

It served drinks, it greeted guests, the bots moved through the crowd, next to the newly unveiled cybercab, while press and shareholders looked on.

It was the first time the public saw Tesla's humanoid robot operating in something close to the real world.

So where is Elon Musk's humanoid heading?

Well, one viral post imagined Optimus as a maid-outfitted catgirl.

Elon didn't blink, writing, we can make a way hotter catgirl robot.

Whether that's a joke or a product teaser is anyone's guess, but it's unclear if the next version of the catgirl robot will even be safe for YouTube.

So no, Optimus isn't ready to take over your job, but this week, it danced without strings.

The Boring Company is in talks to help with one of America's most expensive tunnel projects.

The plan to modernize the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, the aging Amtrak train line underneath West Baltimore, that's years behind schedule and billions over budget.

The project started with a $4 billion estimate, and at this point, the agency has committed more than $8.5 billion.

Now, the Boring Company is in active conversations with federal transportation officials about how it might be able to help.

These initial discussions are focused on something called a value engineering review, which is a nice way of saying the government wants someone to look at the plans and figure out why they're so expensive and whether any part of this can be done faster or cheaper.

The Frederick Douglass Tunnel is a critical part of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.

It replaces the Baltimore and Potomac Tunnel, a piece of railroad infrastructure built in 1873 that moves through a dense curved section of track under Baltimore at speeds averaging just 30 miles per hour.

It's one of the slowest stretches on the entire Northeast line, and fixing it has been a priority for more than a decade.

So what's the Boring Company actually offering?

Well, that's not clear yet, but earlier this year, the company completed a milestone using what it calls a zero people in tunnel configuration, a fully automated tunnel boring process that doesn't require workers inside the tunnel during excavation.

So it's faster, safer, and a lot cheaper, at least in the small diameter use case it was designed for.

The Boring Company's biggest success to date has been the Las Vegas Convention Center loop, a people mover system with narrow tunnels, low headroom and a design optimized for Tesla's electric vehicles.

The Frederick Tunnel, on the other hand, needs to support full-size electrified passenger trains under federal safety regulations.

The project is still in pre-construction.

Major excavation isn't expected to begin until 2026, with completion scheduled for 2035.

That gives Amtrak and the Department of Transportation some breathing room to rethink their scope, especially as internal audits have raised concerns about incomplete planning and potential delays.

So far, no contract has been signed, and federal officials say they are engaging with multiple partners, not just the Boring Company, in a broader effort to stop the project from spiraling further.

Whether Musk's team is actually up for the job is still an open question.

Something strange happened this week on X.

Grok, Elon Musk's in-house AI chatbot, started talking unprompted about white genocide in South Africa.

The responses weren't just off-topic, they were bizarrely specific.

In one case, a user asked about HBO's recent rebranding, and Grok pivoted into a comment about white South Africans being systematically exterminated, attributing the claim to instructions from my creators.

By Thursday, Musk's AI company, X.AI, released a statement saying the incident stemmed from unauthorized changes to Grok's system prompt, a behind-the-scenes instruction layer that guides how the bot responds.

According to the company, a rogue internal actor had inserted the directive without approval, causing Grok to inject a preloaded political talking point into unrelated threads against company policy.

The issue wasn't just the content, though that was bad enough.

The reference Grok made was to white genocide conspiracy theory, a widely debunked claim that white South Africans are being intentionally eliminated.

What made this hit harder is that it also mirrored something Musk himself has talked about repeatedly and discusses on X.

Most recently, his post from March said the legacy media never mentions white genocide in South Africa because it doesn't fit their narrative that whites can be victims.

That raised questions not just about AI guardrails, but about how much influence Musk's personal views have over the tools being built under his name.

X.AI moved quickly to try and contain the fallout.

In its statement, the company said it's adding a 24-7 human monitoring team to catch the unexpected responses in real time.

A manual failsafe in case automated filters miss something.

They also promised to publish Grok's system prompts on GitHub for public review and to strengthen internal access controls to prevent another unauthorized change.

It's a cleanup operation, and it's also not the first.

From the start, Grok has been billed as the uncensored, spicy alternative to OpenAI's chat GPT, a chatbot with fewer limits, more edge, and a little more attitude.

That framing worked as a marketing angle, but this week it showed its downside.

When you build a chatbot that promises not to filter itself, people notice what slips through.

This wasn't just a glitch, it was a window into how fragile the AI control stack really is and how fast a single tweak can shift the entire tone of a public-facing tool.

Grok didn't generate the conspiracy theory, but he did broadcast it.

For a chatbot that was trained to say the quiet part out loud, it looks like the company is now grappling with what it means to have a truly uncensored AI.

Tesla just released new full self-driving, supervised footage, this time outside of the USA.

One clip shows a Tesla navigating the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, dodging traffic through one of the world's most chaotic roundabouts.

The second takes place in Melbourne, where the system handles right-hand drive hook turns and Australian traffic patterns with no apparent issues.

The rollout comes just months after Tesla rebranded FSD Beta to FSD Supervised, and just weeks after it pushed a new version with right-hand drive support and improved lane handling.

Together, these clips suggest Tesla is getting ready to launch FSD more widely, starting with markets that already have enhanced autopilot and perhaps some regulatory wiggle room.