Welcome to Electrified, it's your host, Elonimus, quick shout out to my newest patrons, are now Jay and GHV. Thank you for choosing to support the channel. Tony Siba and Rethinkx put out a new blog post about humanoid robots and as we've said numerous times on the channel over the past few years when Tony Siba says something it would be wise for us to listen. That's because dating back for a decade plus now, Siba's predictions about EV adoption and battery prices among many other disruptive technologies have been incredibly accurate. When Rethinkx talks about a disruption X-curve, it adds the S-curve of the new technology adoption to the old technology quickly falling out of favor.
Siba said over the next 15 to 20 years humanoid robots will disrupt human labor throughout hundreds of industries across every major sector of the global economy. This represents one of the greatest opportunities and greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced. Consider a humanoid robot with a total lifetime cost of $200,000 that works 20,000 hours before decommissioning. Its labor cost would be $10 per hour. Even at this relatively high cost point, humanoid robots are already competitive with human labor in a substantial fraction of the global economy. In reality, lifetime costs of humanoid robots are likely to be far less than $200,000 right from the start.
I'd add those are fairly conservative assumptions because there are 8,760 hours in a year so if each bot only works 20,000 hours before decommissioning, that's only roughly three years. Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost capability of under $10 per hour for their labor on a trajectory to under $1 per hour before 2035 and under $10 per hour before 2045. Tony's expecting these humanoids to work around 7,000 hours per year which would be 80% of the available hours in a year. At first, humanoids will only be able to perform relatively simple tasks but with each day that passes their capabilities will grow, until by the 2040s they'll be able to do virtually anything a human can do and much more besides.
When it comes to disruptions, the response from incumbents is predictable. They mock the new technology for being lower performing while ignoring the rate at which the new technology gets both better and cheaper until it's too late to respond and they face collapse. It's impossible to know in advance the full extent of this labor disruption but the key feature is the marginal cost of labor will rapidly approach zero. We must expect and plan for a sweeping tide of supply driven, not demand driven deflationary pressure across the entire global economy as a function of the disruption of labor by humanoid robots. AKA an abundance of high quality goods increasing the supply and if demand stays static prices come down. Instead of growing only as fast as a human population, available labor can now grow as fast as humanoid robots can be built and deployed, the difference is explosive.
It takes almost 20 years and more than $100,000 to raise a child and prepare them to join the national workforce of a middle income country. Humanoids on the other hand can be added to the workforce as fast as they can be manufactured and it's unlikely their unit cost will exceed that of an inexpensive car even at the very start of commercial deployment. This means that by 2035, adding 1 million people to a nation's workforce might cost $100 billion and take 20 years. Whereas adding 1 million humanoid robots to its workforce might cost just $10 billion and take one single year. Humanoid robots are likely to be one of the most profitable physical product categories ever by virtue of the sheer scale of their production numbers alone.
It's reasonable to expect the number of humanoid robots deployed to exceed 1 billion over the next two decades and possibly much more. If the rate of cost capability improvement in humanoid robots continues as it has been, we will enter an era of material, super abundance and prosperity over the next 10 to 20 years that has hitherto been all but unimaginable outside of science fiction. Much of the value as well as the competitive advantage of humanoid robots from the very start will be in their deployment at scale. This is crucial to keep in mind with all of these startup humanoid companies, which of those will have the best chance at producing these at scale. The humanoid form is a clear choice for facilitating large scale data gathering because humans themselves can facilitate the collection of the needed data.
Unlike a human, a robot can work in completely different environments on completely different tasks from one day to the next. A factory one day, a restaurant the next, a battlefield the day after that because re-skilling is as simple as downloading a software update. The ease of re-skilling and redeploying robots therefore greatly increases the value of the general purpose form relative to specialized forms. It is almost impossible to overstate how radical this transformation of the human condition will be. It also means widespread public concern about technological employment from AI and robotics remains entirely valid in the longer term from perhaps the late 2030s onward. Without very thoughtful decision making among leadership in every domain and very likely a rethinking of the basic social contract across society itself, the destabilization caused by the disruption of labor could well be catastrophic.
It will be very tempting for policy makers, industry leaders and others to pretend that humanoid robotics will never cause an unemployment crisis just as we have seen incumbents pretend that other disruptions throughout history pose no threat to the status quo. But this would be a terrible mistake and would lead to enormous suffering and chaos when human labor markets do finally begin to collapse with no hope of recovery. It would also be a mistake to ban humanoid robots to preserve jobs, although we're almost certain to see calls for this because this would lead to a vicious cycle of diminishing competitiveness, prolonged scarcity, economic stagnation and ultimately societal ills ranging from poverty to civil unrest and much else. At the beginning of the disruption, when demand still vastly exceeds supply, no single producer will be able to capture all markets. So even though the leading technology developers in the humanoid robot sector might limit their humanoid robots to deployment in factories or to lease only user agreements, there will be so much demand for humanoid robots that other firms lower on the leaderboard will still enjoy huge opportunities to step in and target other markets with other business models as well.
Finally the disruption of labor is inevitable and together with the disruptions of energy, transportation and food, it could herald a new age of unprecedented freedom and prosperity. But only if we're willing to experiment to learn and to transcend the limits of the past starting right now. I can't think of a better segue for the optimist video that Tesla released over the weekend. The neural net for optimists is running in real time on the bots FSD computer, so yes that's inference compute, the same as Tesla vehicles. Long term this will be a beautiful thing for economies of scale. Optimists is also able to recover autonomously from its failures and the training data collected right now is via human teleoperation and it's scaled across their fleet for a variety of different tasks.
In the video you'll see optimists sorting battery cells but it was also folding laundry and it was grabbing something in a home storage type setup with a stove pot in the scene and some dish scrubbers. I think that's key because the last time I checked that does not fit in a Tesla factory so Tesla is clearly thinking about applications outside of Tesla for commercial customers. A Tesla bot engineer said the neural net is running entirely end to end meaning it only consumes video coming from the 2D cameras as well as onboard proprioceptive sensors and it produces joint control sequences directly. Optimists is designed such that a single neural net can perform multiple tasks as we add more diverse data to the training process. Right now it's still a little slow and it's not perfect but they're seeing increasingly high success rates with less frequent misses. They're training optimists to recover from those failure cases and they're seeing spontaneous corrections happen. AKA learning on its own just like Tesla's FSD.
Milan said Tesla has already deployed a couple bots at one of Tesla's factories where they're being tested every day at real workstations and they're continuously improving. Further work is ongoing to make it move faster as well as dealing with more adverse terrains all without sacrificing the human-like nature. They're also focusing on repeatability across the fleet, training the neural net to deal with dynamic calibration and small bot to bot variants. At this point, Elon's prediction of useful work from optimists in the factory by the end of this year is actually looking pretty good. Remember what Tony said, most people will vastly underestimate the rate of progress for this disruption.
Unfortunately there's a lot of drama out there about the timeline for optimists in the Tesla community. For now all I would say is most factory tasks are going to be much simpler and more localized comparing that to FSD seems like a fool's errand. Meaning if you're taking the Tesla FSD timelines and trajectory and applying that to optimists and expecting something very similar, I do not think that is wise. You guys know when it comes to humanoids I'm almost always the first person to temper expectations but the tasks in a factory setting are wildly different than solving FSD.
Elon said on X the new optimist's hand later this year will have 22 degrees of freedom and the actuators will move almost entirely into the forearm just like how humans work. Jim Fan in senior research at NVIDIA said optimists' current hands are among the best five-fingered dexterous robot hands in the world. The current hands have 11 degrees of freedom and many competitors only have 6 to 7 and Tesla's has the robustness to withstand lots of object interactions without constant maintenance. So when Tesla releases this next gen optimist's hand it'll have around 3 to 4 times the degrees of freedom of most of the humanoid competition.
For practical purposes that just means optimists will have much more capabilities and the ability to do a wider range of tasks. Elon also said if the current trends continue robots will far outnumber humans. He also said yes this video demonstration was fully autonomous meaning there was no human in the loop anywhere. And that right there is what makes this so impressive. Optimists is performing this activity on its own having learned from teleoperations not from actually being teleoperated. Is Tesla using any other types of training whether it's text or language to output? Are they using any simulated data? Is Tesla doing any imitation learning like they do with FSD? Is optimists watching humans perform certain tasks rather than just teleoperation? And how long did it take optimists to actually perform these tasks?
Online it's tough to track down the precise cost of a single purpose robot arm like optimists could replace but there is a range anywhere from $8,000 all the way up to $50,000 and over. However, those on the high end typically have higher payload capacities but obviously even if optimists cost more than a robot arm, optimists will be able to do many different tasks long term. Jim fan from Nvidia pointed out the low latency between Tesla's teleoperations and the optimist controls but he said teleoperation is insufficient to solve humanoid robotics because it fundamentally does not scale. Translation, this teleoperation training method is only going to be for this phase of disruption. Which leads to the question if you only have the budget or the employee headcount to collect training data for 500 or 1000 tasks...
it'll be interesting to watch what Tesla picks to maximize that skill transfer and to get toward generalization. All I'm going to say for now is it was less than 2 years ago, September of 2022 when Tesla first unveiled the prototype version of optimists which they were calling bumblebee at the time. So if you extrapolate another 2 years with Tesla no longer being compute constrained with all of the learnings from FSD12 and a refocus on AI, I think most of us here can do that math. We need to talk about something so you know how over the past few years the Tesla community has grown from a close knit community of supporters to a very large diverse community with many doubters and skeptics. Well, the exact same thing has happened with AG1 and I think it needs to be talked about.
Since AG1 has grown to be incredibly popular, there are now many people that understand they can also profit from trying to cut it down. And although often times this is actually done by people that are just promoting a competing product, even the people that are not still understand they can generate profit just from the clicks that AG1 and the title can generate. Again, this is exactly like Tesla Q and legacy media realizing that they can profit by attacking Tesla and Elon. Most people will not even address this but it's actually quite important to me. The main argument against AG1 is that the vitamins and minerals...
are not clinically relevant doses, somehow implying that then the product is useless. Remember though, these recommended daily intake levels are just that, recommendations because everybody's body is different. For example, the RDI for vitamin D is around 600 IU. Now do you really think that getting 599 IU will do nothing but if you get one more international unit then boom, magic happens. I think many of us would agree the answer is no, something is better than nothing. But if you actually look at the ingredient list of AG1, many of the 75 vitamins, minerals and probiotics in every serving are over 100% of the daily value.
So look, at the end of the day, AG1 is just something that you would have to try for yourself to see how you respond over the course of a period like 6 months. Just speaking for myself, I feel better knowing that I'm doing what I can to get a baseline of daily nutrition and I'm glad to support a company that I think cares about putting science first and doing the right thing. So if you want to check it out, you can get 5 travel packs and a 1 year supply of vitamin D3K2 linked below. Just remember, no matter how benevolent a company's endeavors like Tesla trying to solve FSD to save lives, there will always be people on the other side of the trade trying to cut it down so do not be deceived. Having Elon succeed in reducing accidents by 50% versus human drivers wouldn't auto insurance rates fall to reflect the reduced underwriting risk thereby adversely impacting Geico's revenues and float and perhaps margins too? Insurance always looks easier than it is and it's so much fun because you get the money at the start and then you find out whether you've done something stupid later on. It's a very tempting business when somebody hands you money and you hand them a little piece of paper but really knowing whether you're, I mean if accidents get reduced 50% it's going to be good for society and it's going to be bad for insurance companies to volume but you know good for society is what we're looking for.
Nothing really new there but people are missing what was said toward the end of this video and it's something we also have to consider. So the point I want to make in terms of Tesla and the fact that they feel that because of their technology the number of accidents do come down and that is certainly proved a bull but I think what needs to be factored in as well is the very cost of each one of these accidents has skyrocketed. So if you multiply the number of accidents times the cost of each accident I'm not sure that total number has come down as much as Tesla would like us to believe. Long term I think that's a moot point but at least in the near term we do have to consider how those scales will balance. Yes FSD will drive down the number of accidents but when it comes to EV accidents as they have more technology enabled cars and fewer repair shops that can work on EVs and fewer EV replacement parts until that industry continues to get built out. Again in the short term there will be at least some offsetting effect but yes absolutely in the long run the insurance industry is in trouble and I'm saying long term in this case is indeed going to be decades.
Gally said come on Warren sell your apple and buy a Tesla to which Elon said he should take a position in Tesla it's an obvious move. I already shared some of my thoughts about this over on X but some people are misunderstanding what I'm saying I'm not saying there's no buffet effect if he were to hypothetically invest in Tesla. I'm just saying personally I don't care about that because that is simply a sentiment shift and the sentiment changes with the wins. Buffet investing in Tesla changes exactly nothing for Tesla's long term fundamentals the business trajectory Tesla is on or the company's financial performance. Last week we talked about this bill that Republicans have introduced and now they said there's no reason that US taxpayers should be bank rolling luxury EV purchases for wealthy individuals or foreign entities. Personally I think the likelihood of this passing is pretty low but just so you know the bill specifically repeals the $7,500 tax credit, eliminates the credit for used EVs and wipes out the federal investment tax credit for EV charging stations and it closes the leasing loophole that has allowed certain taxpayers and foreign entities to evade restrictions on EV incentives. This feels like a good time as ever to remind everybody that in 2022 fossil fuel subsidies surged to a record $7 trillion.
If you ask me let's just even the playing field and wipe out all of these subsidies for oil, gas and EVs. But unfortunately for political and lobbying reasons these people are focused on the order of magnitude less in subsidies that so far have been spent on EVs. So far this year the point of sale $7,500 tax credit has amounted to about $700 million being paid out by the treasury compared to $7 trillion in oil and gas subsidies in 2022 alone. Remember though no matter how this goes Elon has said in the past he doesn't really believe in subsidies for EVs and if they were to be removed Tesla will still have the competitive advantage by far. Yes Tesla absolutely has benefited from the EV tax credit but if that goes away it's going to hurt the legacy OEMs even more.
Tesla made a really nice variant change with the Model Y. The rear wheel drive standard range is no longer the new base Model Y now has 320 miles of range up from 260 before. Elon said although it's rear wheel drive the precision of Tesla's electric motors means it still has great traction on snow and ice with all season tires. In the US the base version of the Model Y is now a long range rear wheel drive starting at $45,000. Elon also said the 260 mile range Model Y's built over the past several months actually have more range that can be unlocked. For $1,500 to $2,000 it'll gain 40 to 60 miles of range depending on which battery cells you have. Working through regulatory approvals to enable this. Elon was asked why not just give it for free to which Elon said we have to pay the bills somehow. So if you bought a standard range Model Y in the past few months over the next few months you may have the option for a software upgrade to unlock some extra range. I know that these software unlocks trigger some people so I'm curious how you guys feel about Tesla doing things like this.
It also means the entry level Model Y now has 10 miles of range more than the long range all wheel drive. Applying to Dana Chandler Elon said pure AI vision auto park coming soon your Tesla will take you to your destination and park automatically unless you ask it otherwise. So when Elon says ask it could he mean with your voice. Then replying to SMR Elon said actually smart summon and banish which is auto park with no one in the car is also coming soon. It would be exciting to see Elon confirm coming soon is with something like version 12.4 but so far no such luck. Elon did say I'm pathologically optimistic with time have been ever since I was a kid. My brother Kimball would tell me an earlier time for the bus schedule from school so that I would actually be there on time. Look you can call me an Elon fanboy or naive if it makes you feel better but I genuinely believe that Elon being overly optimistic with time is far more accurate than saying Elon is a pathological liar. James Stevenson asked about the last mile FSD problem solving saying I don't park at the curb in front of my house like a delivery person I park in my garage in the back of my house so I can charge. Can FSD train on my actions and video after I intervene upon arriving home to which Elon said yeah.
So perhaps the ability for your car on FSD to pull into your driveway perhaps into your garage could be coming.
因此,也许你的车辆在全自动驾驶的情况下能够自动驶入你的车道,甚至是车库中的可能性可能会出现。
Later this year. Accelerating tech on X pointed out a Walmart Tesla semi out on the roads over the weekend. However you may remember about three weeks ago Timothy Dunor on LinkedIn posted another video of a Tesla semi from Walmart. He said this version of the Tesla semi was pulling a reefer which in case you're not familiar just means a refrigerated trailer to carry perishable goods. And more recently on the cab of the Tesla semi you will see Walmart transportation LLC. And Heinrich Zane added up to nine other companies have received or are about to receive the Tesla semi as they're slowly being produced at the prototype production facility near Giga Nevada. And an important distinction we don't know if these Tesla semis are actual deliveries to these customers or they're just being loaned for testing and verification similar to the Martin Brower press release. As Heinrichs understands it Walmart has to put their decal on the truck to legally use them for deliveries either way though as long as the testing goes well back in 2020 remember Walmart placed in order for 130 Tesla semis.
Ordinarily I would not check in on one month but for Germany it's key to keep an eye on what's going on with the EV market. From Roland we have year to date sales for Tesla in Germany for 2024 well behind 2023 and even behind 2022. Thus year to date Tesla is about 36% behind the pace for 2023. What I'm about to say is really just anecdotal from some people that are living in Germany commenting on the state of the EV market. They're saying with these subsidies canceled and a heavy media bias toward ICE vehicles and the lobbies just like we see in the United States. Currently EV demand in Germany is up against some pretty staunch opposition.
Several autobloggers from Weibo have been reporting that Tom Zu is set to move back to his role as vice president for the Chinese market. Zu had left his position in August last year to move to Texas as senior vice president of automotive overseeing global manufacturing, sales, delivery and service operations. Presumably at least for the short term Elon may now step in to fill some of these roles that Tom Zu will be leaving behind. And I would guess eventually Elon will find somebody else to fill some of these roles. Perhaps Tom Zu is going back to China to focus on FSD and the Robotaxi rollout. And or these next generation lower cost Tesla vehicles.
Gigashang High is still arguably Tesla's most important factory as for quarter one. It produced roughly 50% of all of the cars Tesla produced in the quarter. The word is Tesla is continually sending out emails for more rounds of layoffs. As this time around it includes staff from software, service and engineering departments. Tesla has said it expects to book more than $350 million in costs in the second quarter for the mass layoffs. That should however be backed out by analysts and then we get to the part where Tesla actually saves billions of dollars from these layoffs over the years ahead.
You may have already seen Sandy's latest rant but in case you have not this one is not to be missed. Every time I pick up a newspaper or a magazine that talks about Elon Musk it's the same old crap. Look, look around, look around. This is information, this is data, this is analytics, this is money. How much does it cost? How much can be built? What's the characteristics? Has it been tested? All this other crap? And yet, and yet some moron will come on CNN or whatever channel I don't know they're all under the bus as far as I'm concerned and say things that just aren't true. This is what they do. If it bleeds it leads. This is the only rule in the media. How do they sell papers? Fear. When you listen to it, what are you out of your mind? At the end of the day there's nothing that Elon did on this that's anything but good business and good business planning.
I got all upset because I'm sick and tired of getting. We have to be careful about what we see, what we hear and how we interpret it. Elon Musk is the greatest person on the planet right now. Nobody else out there, nobody has made a rocket ship that will go to Mars. Nobody out there has made electrification a reality. You look at that magnificent piece back there even if you don't like the look of the Cybertruck, look inside. Who else is going to be able to push 48 bolts which we should have done in the 1960s? Who else is going to give you an ethernet ring that eliminates a giant amount of canvas? Who else is going to give you rear wheel steering? Who else is going to give you steer by wire? Nobody. Why? Because they don't have the brains, they don't have the guts and they will never, never take a risk. Never. Never. The boring company. The satellite dishes. All these things come from one guy. What do these guys want to do? Make it bleed. Make it bleed. Everything they possibly can. They're going to throw them under the bus. But here's the deal. In 100 years, no one will remember any of these jerks. And I'm telling you right now, you should stop believing in them. Today would be a good day. Because at the end of the day, Elon Musk is the man of this century for sure. Okay, now I got to go and take a rest.
What he just said was actually a big reason why electrified started in the first place. At the time and still now, millions of people are being deceived by the legacy media when it comes to Tesla and really all of Elon's ventures. But at the end of the day, the truth, in this case the best products at the best prices with the most revolutionary technology will ultimately win out despite all of the short-term noise. Waymo's driverless rubber taxis will soon be driving outside of San Francisco's borders. They're going to be fully testing driverless rides in seven new areas in the coming weeks, but they'll only be available to Waymo employees. Waymo will not be testing its vehicles at the San Francisco International Airport as the company requires separate permission from the city of San Francisco for that. Waymo did say expanding our service across the peninsula will take time.
The Department of Energy is setting aside $50 million to help suppliers of parts for internal combustion engine vehicles begin making parts for EVs. These are the type of moves that need to continually happen over time for the cost of EV parts and thus EV insurance to continually come down. A Chinese self-driving firm Beijing Momenta may be looking to do an IPO in the United States. It may happen as early as this year and they're looking to raise up to $300 million. I'm pointing this out though because one of its backers includes General Motors, GM obtained a permit in August to test autonomous driving EVs in designated zones in Shanghai using Momenta technology. Do not get this twisted with Tesla using Baidu's mapping technology. Tesla is using its own FSD technology to deploy it in China. In this case, GM is actually using Momenta's autonomous technology, not anything from cruise.
Lucid released its Q1 financials and it came in with a net loss of $680.9 million which was down quarter over quarter from Q4 which was $779.5 million. After over quarter Lucid's cash and cash equivalents did jump about $800 million to $2.1 billion. However, during the quarter they raised a billion dollars from the PIF. And if you take Lucid's net loss divided by the roughly 1,900 vehicles they delivered in the quarter, that's a net loss per vehicle of $346,000. In the slide deck they're still saying the Lucid gravity is scheduled for start of production late 2024. And they're looking at start of production for their high volume mid-size vehicle for late 2026. At this point, without a cap raise, Lucid is saying they have sufficient liquidity into the second quarter of 2025 which is right around the corner.
Tesla stock closed the day at $184.76 up 1.97% while the NASDAQ was up 1.19%. It was a lower volume day for Tesla trading about 21 million shares below the average volume the past 30 days. Don't forget check out AG1 linked below if you'd like to find out how it works for you. Tomorrow Tuesday will be the last video from me for this week as I'm going out of town I should be back either Monday or Tuesday of the following week. Hope you guys have a wonderful day. Please like the video if you did. You can find me on X linked below and a huge thank you to all of my patreon supporters.