Inside a glass-walled lab at Tesla's engineering headquarters, dozens of workers act out the motions of everyday life: lifting a cup, wiping a table, pulling open a curtain. They repeat each action hundreds of times during eight-hour shifts, and their work is captured by five cameras attached to their helmet and a heavy backpack. CEO Elon Musk sometimes stops by to watch, and Tesla investors visit regularly for demos. It's like being a "lab rat under a microscope," one former worker told Business Insider. The goal is simple: Teach Optimus, the company's robot, how to move like a human.
Tesla Optimus is likely going to be the biggest product the company ever develops, and Musk has even predicted that it could make up about 80 percent of the company's value in the coming years. Teasing the potential to eliminate any trivial and monotonous tasks from human life, Optimus surely has its appeal. However, Musk revealed over the weekend that the humanoid robot should be able to utilize Tesla's dataset for Full Self-Driving (FSD) to operate cars not manufactured by Tesla: