Trick-or-treating season is here. For some New Yorkers, their candy came from a Tesla robot’s hand.
On Monday, Tesla showed off two of its future products in front of the Nasdaq building in Times Square. One was the Cybercab, a fully autonomous vehicle without a steering wheel or pedals that has yet to enter production. The other was Tesla’s humanoid Optimus robot, also in development, which came bearing sweet treats.
New Yorkers filmed Optimus picking up small red and yellow bags from a table and handing them to passersby. The bags contained “gummies,” per “Squawk Box” co-anchor Rebecca Quick.
Quick said that “one or twice, he dropped them,” but that “he went back and picked them up.”
Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm, whom Quick was interviewing, agreed. “I’ve been in the lab with Optimus, and he can fold laundry,” she said.
At the New York demo, Optimus appeared to be plugged in by his shoulders.
This isn’t Optimus’ first time handing out bags of candy. The robot also helped out at Tesla’s recent “Frunk or Treat” event for its employees.
During previous Optimus demos, Tesla’s humanoid robots were tele-operated. At a 2024 “We Robot” event, Tesla deployed several Optimus robots to work as bartenders.
Morgan Stanley analysts later wrote that the robots weren’t fully operating independently and “relied on tele-ops,” or humans controlling them behind the scenes.
In June, insiders told Business Insider that the company was pursuing a vision-only approach for its Optimus program. Instead of training that relied on teleoperation via motion capture suits and virtual reality headsets, Tesla decided to focus on recording videos of workers performing tasks to teach the robot.
Earlier this month, Optimus attended the “Tron: Ares” premiere. On his third-quarter earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said that the bot was not tele-operated at the event.
“Nobody was controlling it, it was just doing Kung Fu with Jared Leto,” Musk said.
Commercializing Optimus is key to Tesla’s growth plan. In September, Musk predicted that 80% of Tesla’s value would eventually come from Optimus. Earlier in the year, he said that Optimus had “the potential to be north of $10 trillion in revenue.”
“Optimus at scale is the infinite money glitch,” Musk said on Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call. “There’s a limit to how much AI can do in terms of enhancing the productivity of humans. There is not really a limit to AI that is embodied.”
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