Tesla’s Optimus robot is seen in a video that Elon Musk shares, but he later clarifies it

On his X (formerly Twitter) account, Elon Musk often posts interesting information, such as memes and updates on the goods his firms are working on. The billionaire recently posted a video showing Tesla’s Optimus robot folding a t-shirt with skill. In the video, a humanoid mimics human movement by deftly taking a T-shirt out of a basket and folding it with both hands. Mr. Musk was compelled to clarify, stating that although Optimus can’t do this on its own just now, it would undoubtedly be able to do so in the future, as the video began to gather popularity online.

“Optimus folds a shirt,” Elon Musk posted on X along with the robot’s video. In a subsequent article, Mr. Musk noted that the robot is not yet capable of doing this on its own. “Important note: Optimus cannot yet do this autonomously, but certainly will be able to do this fully autonomously and in an arbitrary environment (won’t require a fixed table with box that has only one shirt),” the millionaire wrote.

Since Mr. Musk posted the video on Tuesday, it has received over 68 million views. Renowned tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee even questioned Elon Musk over the veracity of the video. “This is a video, not CG?” Mr. Brownlee enquired. Not only that, but some keen-eyed X users expressed doubts regarding actual autonomy in favor of remote control, pointing out that they saw a gloved hand in the video’s background.

“So, explain why there seems to be a shadow hand at the bottom right that seems to control Optimus movement ?” commented a user. “‘Hand’ in lower right at edge of screen comes in/out of frame echoing movements,” said another.

“My mother would have said, ‘Too slow, I’ll do it,’ and taken its position by now. A third person joked, “I always have to do everything around here.” “this is impressive but there’s definitely someone in a body suit controlling its movements, not end to end neural nets on this demo,” said another.

Notably, Tesla’s AI and robotics business includes the Optimus robot, which prioritizes AI. The business claims that this is the only method for creating fully autonomous, bipedal robots using inference hardware. The most recent robot from Tesla is called Optimus Gen 2, and it replaced Optimus Gen 1, which made its debut in March 2022.