“Hey Jeff, it's great hearing from you again. I'm so glad Republic sent out that email letting everyone know about your new venture. I was a member of your Brownstone Unlimited service. I was very disappointed when the service changed over.
I have a question about your recent article regarding Tesla's Optimus. It looks like they are making amazing progress. Do you have any idea how long it might take for general purpose robots to reach mass production so that they are affordable to the general public?
I can think of many things that people have to do every day that no one enjoys, like cleaning or lawn maintenance, in addition to the ways that they could help with jobs that require a lot of manual labor or assisting nurses with patient care. Thanks.” — Synthya G.
Hi Synthya, it’s great to see that you took interest in this topic. You gave some great examples of why there will be so much demand for this technology — like cleaning or lawn maintenance.
I don’t mind cleaning or lawn work, and I always like the results when I’m done. The real issue is the time it takes.
Honestly, I’m still working on cleaning up leaves from the fall… and its January. With autonomous, intelligent robots, time is no longer a constraint.
And to your point, labor shortages — for example in a healthcare setting — would no longer be an issue either.
Not only will the labor shortage be addressed, quality of care will increase as a result. Patients will receive their healthcare more consistently, freeing up the time for human healthcare providers to spend more time on work better suited for humans...
As for your question, I’m excited to say that I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long.
Elon Musk has said that early production for Optimus is possible by the end of this year. I’m assuming that we’ll see early, low volume production by the end of this year or early next year.
That raises the potential for mass production by the second half of 2025. Mass production is important because it drives lower costs and ultimately a larger potential market.
The initial target price for Optimus has been $25,000 — less than the cost of a Model 3 electric vehicle. That’s a great starting point, and well within the range of businesses and high net worth households.
If we think about hotels, healthcare facilities, logistics centers, manufacturing lines, etc., these applications would all benefit from Optimus, and the cost per unit is a fraction of the cost of human labor.
And with scale, costs will decline, opening up to an even larger target market.
Agility Robotics, which is much more enterprise focused, also has the potential for increased production later this year.
Depending on the company’s progress with its Digit bipedal robot, we could see rapidly expanded utilization for the use of moving bins and packages, as well as unloading boxes.
Either way, we’re in for an exciting year of robotics and manifested AI.
