Hey everybody Rob Manward here welcome back to Tesla Daily. Today we have an exciting update on the Tesla Bot or Optimus to talk about. Also got updates on Gigatexus, the cyber truck and a few other items as well.
Not a bad start to the week 4 Tesla stock finishing up about 9.10% on the day today, closing at $246.99. The NASDAQ up just a little bit less than half a percent on the day.
Alright so the big news for today is an update on Optimus or the Tesla Bot program from Tesla directly. They've posted a video that's just over one minute long demonstrating Tesla's current capabilities with Optimus. So kind of an out of the blue update but really nice to see the progress and see the developments that Tesla has made.
A number of which are demonstrated here including Optimus's capability to sort individual objects autonomously. Which might only look cool if you actually understand what is going on here because it's pretty crazy. So Tesla on X says that this is using a neural network that is fully end-to-end trained. So video in to the neural network and then controls out. So just like FSD version 12.
Tesla's senior staff engineer for the Optimus program on X shared quote super excited to share our team's progress over the last few months. We can now accomplish long horizon tasks such as sorting blocks fully autonomously in a completely task agnostic way. Just collect more data and we can train a new complex task without changing any code end quote.
So we see this demonstrated in the video first with the Bot sorting different color blocks into different colored trays which is already impressive enough because this is the bot responding to a prompt to do that rather than being explicitly coded to complete that specific task. That is a fundamental difference that dramatically changes the adaptability of Tesla Bot to be able to handle different situations.
So for example in this video not only does the Tesla Bot sort these blocks by color it also is able to then unsort them grab them from the trays and put them back. That is again not any explicit code to do that it's just given a prompt and then it completes it. This is again noted by Tesla staff engineer saying quote yes it can be prompted the same network is used in this video to sort or unsort the blocks you just tell it what you want and quote.
Now the prompt may not necessarily be natural language today but with large language models like we have seen with chat GPT obviously that's something that's achievable and then to complete the prompt Optimus is obviously going to have to be trained on that task but that is what Tesla is demonstrating here that that is also achievable.
If a wide variety of tasks can be achieved such as sorting the blocks, unsorting the blocks etc etc with the exact same neural network with just more training you can start to see how quickly this could become something that is highly highly effective at a wide variety of different tasks.
If and when that starts to be the case which I think will be a lot quicker than people realize then all of a sudden there is a market for this product maybe one company needs it to sort maybe another company needs it to unsort maybe yet another company needs it to do some other similarly difficult task and on and on and even if those companies don't necessarily need it for versatility specifically for their own use cases the fact that that versatility exists within the same product within the same code base makes it extremely scalable which at the same time makes it much more affordable through economies of scale and that only increases the possible market. If things go well that can quickly become a pretty viciously positive cycle and just like FSD optimists is something that's going to get better over time over the air.
So let's just make up an example let's just say you buy a Tesla bot and you've got it you know sitting in your living room and it's sorting blocks on day one maybe a month later it's sorting laundry maybe a month after that it's loading and unloading laundry next it's loading and unloading the dishwasher next it's doing dishes and so forth from there all with the same hardware all with really the same software but with more training as Tesla collects that data and not only collects it but also trains it through the Nvidia cluster or through dojo.
So it's hard to overstate how exciting it is to hear that optimists is now running on an n10 neural network and is able to complete tasks like this no matter how simple they may be because it shows what can be done on this architecture. In this video, it actually demonstrates a lot. It demonstrates really good dexterity in the hands of optimists and seems to have a good understanding of pressure based on how it interacts with those blocks. Which is even more impressive when you again remember that this is n10 neural networks. There's nothing in the code telling it how much pressure to apply. It's just learned of that through observation.
The bot also shows really good coordination and balance. We've seen that come a long way in a short period of time and that's really fun to see. If you watch the video closely, you can see how all the different pieces of the bot interact to keep those things going, to keep it smooth. Even just using its arms to move these blocks around, you can see the motion in the legs, you can see the motion in the hips. All of those things subtly working together, just like they would for a human.
Of course, the perception is obviously very exciting here. Sorting these blocks by color, though the blocks are different shapes, you might notice. But that shows nice perception. They also have a Tesla engineer moving the blocks around and the bot reacts to that very smoothly, no problems at all. There's also a time where one of the blocks falls on its side and the bot actually corrects that, which presumably it's correcting autonomously without being told to do so because it knows from training that that's not how it's supposed to be. Just a little one-second part of the video, but again pretty mind-blowing if you think about it closely. So a lot of good things there with perception.
Then there's also proprioception, which is the other quote unquote sensory input outside of vision for the Tesla bot. So this has to do with the state of all the different actuators and parts for Tesla bot, which, making it analogous to a human, would be its sense of its own body. For example, with a human, you can close your eyes or be in the dark or whatever and still interact with the things around you, still have a sense of where things are at. That's proprioception and that's again called out by Tesla staff engineer as a part of what we're seeing here. So again, it looks easy, but that's going into what we're seeing with the coordination, the balance, the dexterity. There's a degree of self-awareness that goes into all of those things.
So really fun and exciting to see these developments. I also think it's worth a reminder of some of Elon's comments on the Q2 earnings call. He said that Tesla would have all in-house production candidate actuators ready to go for a Tesla bot in November, so we're not quite there yet but pretty soon. And Elon said that they would start ramping production after that. That may just be for the actuators but may also be for the Tesla bot. Elon said that he believes that.
they'll have optimists doing something useful in the factories next year all right let's a couple of things on this of course there were some people on x speculating that there was some cgi involved in this again tesl engineer commenting saying you know you're doing cool stuff when some people think that what you're doing is cgi so presumably none of that here i think maybe people getting a little bit mixed up by the speed of the clips which tesl does note is at one and a half time speed so a 50 increase which is clearly noted in the video and makes a lot of sense to do if you're demonstrating something like moving some blocks around especially in the ever shorter attention span society that we seem to be living in
all right moving on from tesl bot we've got a couple updates on kicketexis from joe tagmire he is saying that all employees are now back at work today doesn't mean that production is fully back up to speed immediately but sounds like that's expected to be the case next week. so that is nice to see and then joe also spotted a couple of new cyber trucks out there one of which looks like has plastic wrap on the seats which i think is obviously a good sign that we may be getting closer to vehicles that are prepped for delivery there was kind of an interesting thing that happened over the weekend with the cyber truck reservations that people had sounds like early reservation numbers are no longer seeing their specific configuration on their reservation whereas later reservation numbers can still see that doesn't necessarily mean anything but maybe tesla in there playing around with some things which speculatively could mean some things being put in place to convert those reservations to orders but we'll just have to wait and see also at kicketexis today the president of hungry announced that she met with elon musk at the factory sounds like they initially intended to meet at the budepest demographic summit but that didn't work out so kicketexis instead not a whole.
lot more information here but the president did say that there would be more details tomorrow nevertheless elon's meetings with world leaders continue next up we've got a quick update on tesla's vpp or virtual power plant program in california i missed this last week but tesla has expanded the vpp program to san diego so powerwall customers there can now sign up for the vpp if they would like and potentially earn a little bit of revenue from doing so
all right next up we've got a couple updates on other automakers particularly ford last week we had talked about the status of negotiations for the auto workers union in canada with ford those negotiations over the weekend were officially completed as the union has voted to ratify an agreement with ford for a three-year contract which will include a 10% wage increase in the first year and then two and three percent increases in the second and third year among various other terms of the contract so as we had talked about ford actually avoided at least for the time being further strikes in the u.s as the uaw said that they were making a decent effort and they're now the first to reach an agreement in canada though the negotiations there seem to be a little bit more sequential rather than all at once like we are seeing the uaw employee in the u.s.
In the U.S., we do have a report from The Detroit News today that Ford has announced that they have halted the construction of the three and a half billion dollar battery factory project that they had announced back in February. We talked about this at the time. This was the one that was going to be done in partnership with CATL for lithium iron phosphate batteries in Michigan. At the time, Ford had said that this would produce approximately 35 gigawatt hours of batteries per year, enough for about 400,000 Ford EVs. At the time, Ford said that this would begin production in 2026. As to the current status, with this update today, a Ford spokesman told The Detroit News that, "We're pausing work and we're going to limit spending on construction at Marshall until we're confident about our ability to competitively run the plant." Alright, I mean certainly not the most inspiring comment there. And this is not the first time, even in the last few months, that we have seen a pretty significant adjustment in their guidance around their EV business. Remember, back in July, they updated their 600,000 production target from this year to next year. They guided for greater losses on the EV business this year and they also changed their 2 million vehicle production target, which was previously 2026, to whenever they're not sure now. So now, after only a couple of quarters after making this announcement, and by the way, talking about how many jobs this created, not even, well, create, this creates 2,500 jobs, they say now it's paused before probably even really getting started, and they're not confident in their ability to run it competitively. Now, maybe this relates to the UAW negotiations. Obviously, the timing is interesting in that regard. This could even be a negotiation tactic in some way, or maybe a repercussion of how the negotiations are unfolding. So, pretty big deal here, and this will be an interesting one to keep an eye on. The spokesperson also said that, "We haven't made a final decision about the investment there." So presumably more to come on this, and I would imagine that this is a topic for the next earnings call if there's not more information out before then. Alright, last item for today, just kind of a quick and subtle update from SpaceX on the number of Starlink subscribers. Starlink on X posted that they now connect more than two million active customers and counting with high-speed internet. So congratulations to SpaceX for crossing that two million customer threshold, right around nine months after that one millionth customer mark was surpassed last December. Alright, that'll wrap it up for today then. As always, thank you for listening. Make sure you're subscribed and signed up for notifications. And also find me on X at Tesla Podcast. And we'll see you tomorrow for the Tuesday, September 26th episode of Tesla Daily. Thank you.
据美国的《底特律新闻》报道,福特公司今日宣布已暂停早在今年二月份宣布的耗资35亿美元的电池工厂项目的建设。我们在当时就进行了讨论。这个项目计划与中国的宁德时代合作在密歇根州生产磷酸铁锂电池。当时,福特表示该工厂每年将生产大约35吉瓦时的电池,足够用于约40万辆福特电动汽车。福特当时表示该工厂将在2026年开始生产。至于目前的进展情况,根据今日的最新消息,福特发言人告诉《底特律新闻》:“我们正在暂停工作,并限制对马歇尔工厂的建设支出,直到我们对我们能否在竞争中运行该工厂有信心为止。”好吧,可以说这并不是最鼓舞人心的评论。而且,在过去几个月中,这已经不是福特首次对其电动汽车业务的指导方针进行相当大的调整了。记住,今年7月,他们将年产量目标从今年调整到了明年的60万辆。他们预测今年的电动汽车业务亏损会更大,他们还将之前定于2026年的200万辆汽车生产目标改为现在他们不确定的时间。因此,现在,在进行了几个季度之后,而且请注意,当时他们还谈到了这个项目创造了多少就业机会,但现在项目还没真正开始就已经暂停了,并且他们对能够竞争性地运营该工厂没有信心。现在,也许这与美国汽车工人联合会的谈判有关。从时间上看,这是很有趣的。这甚至可能是某种谈判策略,或者是谈判进展的后果。所以,这是一个相当重要的问题,我们将继续关注。发言人还表示:“我们还没有就在那里的投资作出最终决定。”因此,我们可以预计这方面还会有更多信息,我相信这会成为下一次财报电话会议中的一个话题,如果在那之前没有更多信息的话。好的,今天的最后一个消息,SpaceX关于Starlink订户数量的一个快速而微妙的更新。Starlink on X发布消息称,他们现在已经连接了超过200万个活跃用户,并提供高速互联网服务。因此,祝贺SpaceX成功突破两百万订户门槛,大约在去年十二月突破一百万订户后的九个月左右。好的,今天就到这里,感谢您的收听。请确保订阅并开启通知,并在X上找到我,我的用户名是Tesla Podcast。我们明天再见,收听9月27日星期二的《特斯拉日报》。谢谢。