Elon Musk
Elon MuskREUTERS/Mike Blake
  • Elon Musk recently sat down with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Insider's parent company, Axel Springer.
  • Musk shared on his thoughts on potential uses for Optimus, a humanoid robot Tesla is developing.
  • He said it could help preserve memories and personalities if people "download" those things onto Optimus.

Elon Musk has high hopes for a future with humanoid robots.

"Humanoid robots are happening," he said. "The rate of advancement of AI is very rapid."

Musk shared his thoughts during a recent conversation with Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, at Tesla's factory in Fremont, California.

He spoke about potential future uses for Optimus, a humanoid robot Tesla is making.

"Optimus is a general purpose, sort of worker-droid," the Tesla CEO said. "The initial role must be in work that is repetitive, boring, or dangerous. Basically, work that people don't want to do."

When asked if Optimus could feature in people's daily lives, such as by lending a hand around the house, Musk concurred, saying it'd be a "general focused humanoid."

He said he thinks it's possible that people may one day be able to download their brain capacities into an Optimus.

"We could download the things that we believe make ourselves so unique," he said. "Now, of course, if you're not in that body anymore, that is definitely going to be a difference, but as far as preserving our memories, our personality, I think we could do that."

Musk also spoke to the robot's bipedal design.

"Humanity has designed the world to interact with a bipedal humanoid with two arms and ten fingers," he said. "So if you want to have a robot fit in and be able to do things that humans can do, it must be approximately the same size and shape and capability."

Musk said he thinks Tesla will have "something pretty good at the prototype level" this year and might have "at least a moderate volume production" around the end of 2023.

He first unveiled the 5-foot-8, 125-pound "Tesla Bot" during a company AI event in August 2021. In January, he called it "the most important product development we're doing this year." 

Besides Optimus, Musk spoke about a range of other topics in the interview. He shared his thoughts on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, saying, "We cannot let Putin take over Ukraine." He added that he thinks Putin is "significantly richer" than him even though Musk is the world's richest person on record.

Read the original article on Business Insider