• Elon Musk said a shortage of training data meant teaching Tesla's Optimus robot is like raising a toddler.
• Tesla has built an "Optimus Academy" where robots can learn through "self-play," Musk told investors.
• The EV giant said on Wednesday that it had begun production of Optimus.

Tesla is sending its Optimus humanoid robot back to school.

Speaking on the company's earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Elon Musk compared training the EV maker's humanoid robot to raising a toddler.

Musk said that while Tesla's autonomous driving models can learn from data collected by its massive fleet of vehicles, its Optimus robot has to learn by watching people do tasks and practicing them itself, a process similar to how humans learn.

"You can see this when you have a toddler, and they initially are sort of wobbly, and they don't know how to do things, and eventually, they learn to wipe their own ass, which is a big milestone," Musk told investors.

"They learn to read and do all sorts of things, and they learn this by playing. And we actually need Optimus to play at scale in order to have it be really good at tasks in the real world," Musk said.

The Tesla CEO added that the company was building out an "Optimus Academy" where prototypes can practice a wide range of tasks and generate training data to teach future versions of Optimus.

"For Optimus to get the training data we need, we actually need to make a lot of Optimi. So we need to make, I think, on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots and then have them do self-play," said Musk.

Tesla said on Wednesday that it had begun production of Optimus at its Fremont factory, with Musk saying the company expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers by the end of next year.

The near-trillionaire cautioned that production would be "somewhat bumpy" and that development of the humanoid robot still has some way to go.

He listed the challenges of designing durable yet responsive robotic hands, as well as AI capable of handling open-ended tasks, among the main hurdles Tesla faces.

Tesla is not alone in setting up robot academies to provide training data for humanoid robots.

Unlike large language models like ChatGPT, which were trained on the vast corpus of text data available on the internet, robotics faces a shortage of real-world training data to teach humanoids to navigate the physical world.

Other startups, such as Texas-based Apptronik, have also set up "data factories" where robots load conveyor belts and sort objects to generate training data to combat the data shortage.

• Tesla has begun production of its humanoid robot, Optimus, in Fremont, California.
• Musk said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of 2027.
• Musk said it will take at least a year to produce 20,000 Optimus units a week.

Tesla has begun producing its long-awaited humanoid robot, Optimus, at its Fremont factory, the company said in its quarterly earnings report.

"The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla said, saying the current manufacturing process is "suitable for a commercial product."

"There's still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has long duration," CEO Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q3 earnings call. "It can't, like, wear out after a month."

Musk said the company will take at least a year to scale up Optimus production to 20,000 units a week in Fremont. He said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of next year.

Musk tempered expectations about how quickly Tesla can scale up Optimus production because it is "such a radically new product." He said the early stages of production will be "somewhat bumpy" because "there's like 10,000 things that have to go right" to build the robot. One of the big challenges Musk outlined is building robot hands.

Musk said Tesla is building an "Optimus Academy," where robots will practice tasks and generate data to improve the AI models that power them. The company also plans to install its next-generation AI5 chip in Optimus in April, which will give the robots more computing power and be a "big step change in intelligence," Musk said.

The latest version of Optimus has not been unveiled. Musk said he expects to release a video of Optimus within one or two months. He previously said Tesla was keeping the robot under wraps to prevent competitors from copying its design.

Tesla stopped producing the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California, plant earlier this year to make room for an Optimus line designed to eventually produce a million robots a year. A second line under construction in Austin is planned to have an annual capacity of 10 million robots.

Tesla is competing in a crowded humanoid market. Agility Robotics, which plans to go public, has deployed its Digit robot across nine customer facilities, while Figure AI has announced deployments in logistics and distribution centers this year. Sunday Robotics, 1X, and Weave Robotics are preparing to ship robots into homes this fall.

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