Elon Musk Says AI Robots Could Outnumber Humans

Elon Musk is all about robots. He has likened his self-driving Tesla cars to “robots on wheels.” As for the legged robots, he has big plans to eventually sell a humanoid robot named Optimus. When it showed off the prototype last year, Optimus failed to impress artificial intelligence experts and investors. But that didn’t deter Musk, and at Tesla’s investor day this week, the billionaire showed off the latest version and made a great prediction: Humanoid robots could outnumber humans.

“You could see some sort of home use for robots, certainly industrial uses for robots, humanoid robots,” Musk said. “I think we could go beyond a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans. It’s not even clear what an economy is at this point.”

Optimus is far from leading the robot revolution. When Musk first revealed it to the public in 2021, it turned out to be a human in a robotic suit rather than an actual prototype. In 2022, Optimus had to be rolled into Tesla’s AI tag. In his presentation this year, Musk showed videos of the new Optimus, which appears to run by itself.

Musk isn’t the only one to point to a looming economic disruption due to the AI ​​and robot disruption. Robots have already been introduced into factories to replace jobs previously done by humans, and last year saw record demand for automation as companies struggled to hire workers. But recent AI developments may only accelerate this shift. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna recently said he believes office work will be replaced by AI and that robots could even help with future labor shortages as the population ages. And Kai-Fu Lee, an AI venture capitalist, said in 2019 that the technology would replace 40% of jobs, including both white-collar and manual workers, within the next 15 years.

Tesla’s website describes the humanoid “Tesla-Bot” as one that could “perform unsafe, repetitive, or tedious tasks.” But Musk’s vision of what robots can be goes well beyond that. Musk said Wednesday he expects humanoid robots “will likely be worth significantly more than the car side of things over the long term” as their uses will be wide-ranging. He has also mentioned the use of robots as “buddy” in the past.

While Musk is upbeat about his own robots, he said Wednesday that the underlying technology for AI still “stresses” him.

“It’s quite a dangerous technology. I’m afraid I did some things to speed it up,” he said.

Musk co-founded ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, but left the company after just a few years. He has since called the chatbot tool “concerning” And criticized OpenAI because it contradicted its purpose of being a not-for-profit open-source “counterbalance to Google” and accused it of being a “closed-source company with maximum profit”.

It is believed that the second richest man in the world is now putting together a project that could compete with OpenAI.

Tesla did not return immediately wealth‘s request for comment.