Elon Musk: Real-World AI Is the Missing Piece for Useful Humanoid Robots

Elon Musk: Boston Dynamics has shown it's possible to make a compelling robot. What's missing is enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things.

“It took me a while to realize that, in order to solve self-driving, you really needed to solve real-world AI. At the point at which you solve real-world AI for a car, which is really a robot on four wheels, you can then generalize that to a robot on legs as well.

Companies like Boston Dynamics have shown that it's possible to make quite compelling, sometimes alarming robots. So, from a sensors and actuators standpoint, it's certainly been demonstrated by many that it's possible to make a humanoid robot.

The things that are currently missing are enough intelligence for the robot to navigate the real world and do useful things without being explicitly instructed.
So, the missing things are basically real-world intelligence and scaling up manufacturing. Those are two things that Tesla is very good at. We basically just need to design the specialized actuators and sensors that are needed for a humanoid robot.

People have no idea. This is going to be bigger than the car.”

TED Interview, Giga Texas, April 6, 2022